Message to all users, and their reply

Before you need to reboot a VM, or do some destructive maintenance on there, it is a good practice to at least tell the user(s) of that VM what is going to happen. But how do you address the users of a VM? They can be connected to a console (local) or via a RDP session (remote). And how do you get their reply back?

 

Exactly such a question appeared in the VMTN PowerCLI Community recently. And after some digging, it seems that is possible through a PowerShell script that uses the Remote Desktop Services API, provided through the wtsapi32.dll. Note that the VMs we are looking at, all are running a Windows guest OS.

Continue reading Message to all users, and their reply

My favorite PowerShell editor is free now!

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 🙂

Changing VMware Tools scripts

There was another interesting question on the PowerCLI community. Mike was wondering if it would be possible to change the VMware Tools scripts with a PowerCLI script. As far as I can see there are two options available with the VMware Tools scripts.

  1. You can run the default scripts that are installed on the guests when you install VMware Tools
  2. You can use Custom scripts and you have to specify the path of these scripts to VMware Tools

To use the 2nd option you will need, as William already pointed out, the VIX APIs.

But if you can live with the first option, and reuse the default scripts, the current PowerCLI build has all you need.

Continue reading Changing VMware Tools scripts

The Onyx alternative ?

On Carter’s vSPhere PowerCLI Blog site we learned, just before VMworld, about Project Onyx. The program that will come out of this project will allow users to generate PowerShell code from actions done in the vSphere Client. But while we wait till the program comes in GA, is there an alternative for finding out what API call(s) an action in the vSphere Client generates ? In fact there is. And it’s free ! Continue reading The Onyx alternative ?