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Runtime Name via Extensiondata and New-VIProperty

One of the demos we did in our VMworld 2010 US and Europe sessions, showed the use of the new Extensiondata property and of the new New-VIProperty cmdlet. Both features were introduced with PowerCLI 4.1. In my PowerCLI 4.1 brings the New-VIProperty cmdlet post I already showed the interesting possibilities this new cmdlet offers.

On my return from VMworld Europe there was a new thread in the PowerCLI Community that asked how one could get at the Runtime Name property as it is shown in the vSphere Client. The Get-ScsiLun and Get-ScsiLunPath cmdlets unfortunately do not return that property. So I guessed it was time to show once more the strength of the New-VIProperty cmdlet.

Continue reading Runtime Name via Extensiondata and New-VIProperty →

Nearly real time monitoring

The VMTN Communities have always been a useful source of inspiration for writing scripts. This week, for example, there was an intriguing question raised in the Onyx Community. The user wanted to know if it was possible to monitor changes in the vSphere environment in real time.

As far as I know there is no API in the vSphere SDK to do real time monitoring. But the EventHistoryCollector can deliver something that I prefer to call nearly real time monitoring. The following script is a very basic function, written primarily to show that this principle of nearly real time monitoring works. The function displays some selected properties of each event it sees.
Continue reading Nearly real time monitoring →

Finding Thin disks

Last Sunday there appeared an interesting thread in the VMTN PowerCLI Community where one the questions was how to find all ‘Thin‘ virtual disks without passing via a virtual machine. The reason for this question was that most of the user’s virtual machines in Lab Manager are not registered on the vCenter Server.

My first idea was to use ‘Get-Datastore | Get-Harddisk‘ and then use the Extensiondata property to query the thinProvisioned property. Something like Arne did in his PowerCLI: Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) info post. But that, unfortunately, doesn’t work since the Extensiondata property is $null in this case.

Continue reading Finding Thin disks →

Taking the new Onyx 2.0 for a spin

One of the announcements during VMworld 2010 in San Francisco that perhaps got a bit obscured by the other “big” announcements, was the release of Onyx 2.0. For those of you that hadn’t heard of Project Onyx before, this nifty little tool captures all SOAP traffic that is passed between your vSphere client or PowerCLI session and the vCenter or ESX(i) server to which you are connected.

And that’s not all, the Onyx program will translate the captured SOAP traffic into PowerShell code. This allows you to see which vSphere APIs are used and how parameter objects for these methods are constructed.

Update September 16th 2010: the Onyx Development Team has just released a new build (2.0.3910.32223) that fixes some issues when using Onyx with the PowerCLI client.  Congratulations to the Onyx Development Team for this quick resolution of the problem !

Continue reading Taking the new Onyx 2.0 for a spin →

Using the ThinApp SDK from PowerShell

On August 19th 2010 the long awaited ThinApp SDK became available.It allows you to programmatically interact with your ThinApp packages.  The SDK package is foreseen to be used with Visual Studio, as can be deduced from the  included merge module called ThinAppSDK.msm. The samples that come with the SDK unfortunately only show the use of the SDK with C++ and VBScript. But with a bit of fiddling it’s quite easy to use the APIs from your PowerShell environment.

This post will show you:

  • how to set up the SDK for use from PowerShell
  • some usage examples from PowerShell.

Continue reading Using the ThinApp SDK from PowerShell →

PowerCLI 4.1 brings the New-VIProperty cmdlet

In the new PowerCLI 4.1 build 264274 there are two new cmdlets, called New-VIProperty and Remove-VIProperty, that deserve your special attention.

The New-VIProperty cmdlet allows you to add a new properties to any PowerCLI object (InventoryItem, HostSystem, VirtualMachine…). And it’s up to you to define what the value of this new property will !

The Remove-VIProperty cmdlet allows you to remove such a new property.

These new cmdlets, combined with the new Extension property, will change several of the well established ways that you use in your PowerCLI scripts. And besides adding a lot of flexibility, the extension property will make your scripts considerably faster (if used wisely).

Continue reading PowerCLI 4.1 brings the New-VIProperty cmdlet →

Script ‘esxupdate -query’

I received an interesting comment on my Events – Part 7 : Working with extended events – Update Manager post from Suresh. He wanted to know if it was possible to create a similar report with the vCenter Update Manager PowerCLI cmdlets as you can get with the esxupdate query command.

Continue reading Script ‘esxupdate -query’ →

Events – Part 7 : Working with extended events – Update Manager

As I already mentioned in my previous post, Events – Part 6 : Working with extended events – Converter, another
add-on that produces extended events, is the Update Manager.

With the recent introduction of the vCenter Update Manager PowerCLI snapin, it is now fairly easy to automate all aspects of patch and update management in your vSphere environment. And with the help of the extended events produced by Update Manager, you can easily produce reports. This post shows one way of doing this.

Continue reading Events – Part 7 : Working with extended events – Update Manager →

Events – Part 6 : Working with extended events – Converter

In a previous post, called Events, Dear Boy, Events – Part 2, I mentioned that some tools/add-ons use a special event type called ExtendedEvent. Two classic examples are the Converter and the Update Manager. If you want to compile a report for any these tools it’s important to understand what is available in the extended events they produce.

If you want to know if there are any other tools/add-ons in your vSphere environment that produce extended events, then you can use the first script from the Events, Dear Boy, Events – Part 2 post to get a complete list of all available extended events.

In this post I’ll show how to use the Converter extended events.

Continue reading Events – Part 6 : Working with extended events – Converter →

Beyond Export-Csv: Export-Xls

Warning: this post has no “virtual” content !

This time I post a function that allows you to export your data to a “real” spreadsheet (XLS format) instead of a CSV file.

The reason for posting this function was a series of threads in the PowerCLI Community by Suresh. Over several threads he has been collecting scripts that create various reports on his vSphere environment. Ultimately he wanted to have a spreadsheet where each report would be stored on a worksheet.

PowerShell has the very handy Export-Csv cmdlet to create CSV files but afaik nothing for creating XLS files 🙁

Continue reading Beyond Export-Csv: Export-Xls →