An interesting question arrived in my mailbox recently. The user was trying to find out how he could assign a vCenter license. The vSphere API Reference clearly pointed to the UpdateAssignedLicense method.
But the value that should be provided in the entity parameter was a bit of a mystery. An entity ID for a vCenter was new for me.
The previous parts (Part1, Part2 & Part 3) in the dvSwitch series showed how to create a dvSwitch, a portgroup for Virtual Machines and a Service Console & vmKernle portgroup. The test setup now looks something like this:
The double Service Consoles and vmKernel connection might look confusing at first. But when you select one these connections, the vSphere client will show you to which uplink a specific connection is going.
With the introduction of vSPhere the types of Tasks you can select when you create a new Scheduled Task has increased. This is a very useful feature that allows you to schedule for example your (s)vMotions, your Snapshots, your Imports and Exports and so on.
In the PowerCLI Community there was a recent question on how these Scheduled Tasks can be created from PowerShell (see relocate vm’s from csv file and create schedule task in VC).
Being able to create a Scheduled Task for a svMotion for several guests from a PowerShell script, instead of clicking away in the vSphere Client, would be another step on the path of vSphere automation. Continue reading Scheduled Tasks – MethodAction
In Part 1 of the dvSwitch scripting series I created a simple dvSwitch with 2 uplinks, which I connected to all the ESX hosts that were returned as possible candidates. In this part I will show you how to add a dvPortgroups and how you can connect Virtual Machines to this dvPortgroup.
This is the schematic of what we have so far.
With the introduction of vSphere one of the new features that was introduced was the vNetwork Distributed Switch. This new type of switch offers many more features than the “classical” vSwitch we knew.
In the current PowerCLI build there are no cmdlets present to create, configure, manage and remove this new type of switch. Surely this will change in one of the upcoming PowerCLI releases.
To bridge the time till the next release, I decided to write a number of functions that would allow PowerCLI users to work with the vNetwork Distributed Switch. Continue reading dvSwitch scripting – Part 1 – Creation
On the PowerCLI community someone raised a question how he could get a list of guests that were created longer than 30 days ago. The obvious source to get this kind of information are the events that VI/vSphere keeps. Note that in vSphere you will have to take into account how long events are kept! The current PowerCLI build provides the Get-ViEvent cmdlet that allows you to get at the information. Continue reading Events: a great source of information – Part 1
When you are using NIC Teaming you have a number of possible options to define the failover criteria. The failover criteria define when a NIC Team will switch from an active to a standby NIC. When you examine the HostNicFailureCriteria object in the API Reference Guide, you will notice that there are more criteria available than those that are accessible through the vSphere Client. Continue reading TA2650 scripts – Part 4 – NIC Teaming – “hidden” failure criteria
The XML file that can be created with the script from TA2650 scripts – Part 1 – Profiling your vSphere environment can also be used to assist you when you need to use the SDK. Continue reading TA2650 scripts – Part 2 – Using the profile XML file for SDK programming
