After Part 1 – The Basics in this series, I will show in Part 2 how you can set up Tintri’s VM Protection through Replication. And to conclude this post I will show some Reporting that you can do with the Tintri Automation Toolkit.
Continue reading Tintri Automation Toolkit – Part 2 – VM Protection and Reporting
There are numerous companies that recognized the usefulness of PowerShell, and how it can help automate their product. The PowerCLI PSSnapin from VMware is a great example.
And now Tintri, the creators of the VMstore, have joined the ranks. Tintri delivers a PowerShell module, called the Tintri Automation Toolkit, that allows administrators to automate the monitoring and management of a VMstore system. The Toolkit also nicely leverages PowerShell constructs such as object piping for enabling end-to-end VM-level automation.
These posts will not be providing a detailed description of the VMstore, and all its merits. There are ample other sources available for that. Needless to say you should definitely have a look at the Tintri website if you want to learn more about the VMstore. I listed a couple of other sources at the end of the series.
I was given the opportunity to have a preview of the of the Tintri Automation Toolkit module, and was permitted to play around with the cmdlets in the Tintri lab.
To take away all suspense, I was quite impressed!
Continue reading Tintri Automation Toolkit – Part 1 – The Basics
One of the questions, related to working with vSphere events and tasks, that often appear in the PowerCLI Community, is how do we know which events to select for a query.
To make that task a bit easier, I wrote the Event-O-Matic script. It’s a GUI that allows you to pick a number of events, and the script will generate the PowerShell code, and place it in the clipboard. The Event-O-Matic script was mentioned during our VMworld 2013 US session VSVC4944.
Update November 9th 2022:
Update September 7th 2013:
During last year’s VMworld #NotSupported sessions one of the hot topics was William Lam‘s vInception talk. “Nested ESXi” has since then become indispensable in the homelab of everyone tinkering with virtualisation !
As a follow-up to that session, William posted several blog posts on the subject. You can find them all in a handy overview.
But as much as I like his clear instructions on how to set up nested ESXi, I wanted to automate the process 🙂 In my homelab I create, and remove, ESXi VMs on a regular basis. So with the “If you do it more than once, automate it” in mind, I decided to create a function for the process.
Continue reading HL Tools – Part 2 – Create a Nested Hypervisor
I had the pleasure to present a session on “PowerCLI and vSPhere Performance and Capacity reporting” during the Dutch VMUG meeting of February 8th 2013. Although the meeting took place in the “Karnaval” weekend, there was a great turnout and, as always, a very attentive and interested audience. Thanks for attending the session guys !
In the session I tried to show how easy it is to produce decent performance and capacity reports about your vSphere environment with PowerCLI. During the session I did some demos to show some aspects of PowerCLI and statistics. This post contains the code, and some annotations, I used during these demos.
Continue reading Dutch VMUG: The Statistics Reporting Session
Some time ago I published the Export-Xls function to the world in my Beyond Export-Csv: Export-Xls post. And it has been one of the more popular functions on my blog.
Just before Christmas 2012 I got a comment from Gilbert where he informed me that he had written an Export-Xlsx function and had borrowed some of the parameters that were on the original Export-Xls function. We exchanged a couple of emails with suggestions and ideas, and yesterday the finalised Export-Xlsx function was posted on Gilbert’s ITPilgrims blog (which you should follow btw) in his Export-Xlsx post.
In this post I will publish this new Export-Xlsx function with some annotations, and I will also show how you can now export your data in the order you want, provided you’re using PowerShell v3.
In a recent thread on the VMTN PowerCLI Community someone asked if it is possible to get historical hard disk statistics. I referred the user to my Datastore usage statistics post, where I showed how to use the “disk” metrics to get that information.
But getting the individual vDisk statistics is a bit more tricky compared to getting the datastore statistics, as I showed in that post. The “disk” metrics hold the information, but the Instance that points to the MoRef value of a VM makes it a bit more tricky to retrieve.
Be forewarned, the “disk” metrics hold usage data for all the vDisks that a specific VM has on a specific datastore. You will not be able to get individual vDisk statistics, unless the vDisks are stored on different datastores !
On the positive side, the “disk” metrics will allow you to see how your vDisks increase in size over time. For your Thick vDisks that increase will be by expanding them, and for your Thin vDisks it will also show the natural growth.
I rarely post about products, since I want to keep my blog “technical“, but there was some big news from Idera today.
As from version 4.6, their famous PowerShell Plus editor is now a free tool.
This is the editor I have been using to write, and debug, my PowerShell and PowerCLI scripts since day 1.
It would take me several pages to list the features I like and use in PowerShell Plus, but there are 2 that were ‘love at first sight’ for me; the Debug mode and the Variables pane. You can’t go without those when you are writing a script.
So why not give it a try, it’s for free now 🙂
Recently I had the pleasure of doing a guest post, called Finding your way in the PowerCLI Community, on the PowerCLI blog. The subject of the post was how to find community threads, that might hold an answer to your question.
Now this wouldn’t be a PowerShell/PowerCLI blog, if I didn’t try to automate the procedure. And with a serious amount of RegEx involved, I was able to create some working code. Here it is, my Find-VMTNPowerCLI function.
Warning: pure PowerShell, no PowerCLI content !
Another post coming from our Dutch VMUG Event 2011 presentation. On position number 10, we find the vMotion Enhancements that were introduced with vSphere 5.
A single vMotion can now scale over multiple NICs. This feature can use a regular vSwitch or distributed vSwitch.On YouTube there are 2 videos, uploaded by VMwareKB, that show how to configure such a vMotion enabled multi-NIC vSwitch, regular and distributed.
Very useful videos, but as you can imagine, I wanted to automate this. No GUI clicking for me 😉
