Reporting on RPO violations from vSphere Replication

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vSphere Replication was introduced with vSphere 5.0 and SRM 5.0 providing a way for customers without the ability to leverage storage array replication to utilize Site Recovery Manager (SRM) within their environments as their disaster recovery solution.

With the release of vSphere 5.1 vSphere Replication also became available as a standalone replication solution included with Essentials Plus and higher vSphere license editions. Customers now have the option of deploy vSphere Replication on its own to provide basic per-VM replication for use cases where SRM’s advanced DR orchestration capabilities were not applicable.

As adoption of vSphere Replication is growing amongst the vSphere 5.1 customer base so has the number of requests for ideas, hints and tips on what kind of reporting could be added to provide usage information for the various events that could occur amongst a collection of replicated VM’s.

Some examples would be:

  • highlight when a given VM violates its RPO
  • detect when the violated RPO state is restored
  • compute the time duration for the RPO violation
  • collate the total amount of data replicated for a given VM over a given time period

The number of customers asking for this kind of information led to this blog being written and the scripts being created in conjunction with Lee Dilworth who is a Principal Systems Engineer with VMware and SRM expert.

In this initial article we have included some scripts that will provide the Continue reading →

Using Show-Command with PowerCLI

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Recently when at the Western Pennsylvania VMUG I was asked by Rob Velarde if I had tried Show-Command with PowerCLI, I know that PowerCLI5.1 R2 now supports PowerShell V3 where the Show-Command cmdlet was introduced so thought I would take a look.

Looking at a cmdlets syntax can be complicated for people who are new to PowerShell and PowerCLI, the below is an example of the New-VM cmdlet…

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So what does all this mean?

 

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Altering VMKernel NIC MTU with PowerCLI

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I was asked if it was possible to set the VMKernel Nic MTU in PowerCLI, after looking on the internet there were several people showing how to do this but some of them were very complicated, maybe this has got easier over time as with each release of PowerCLI one of the things the PowerCLI Dev team looks at is how to make things easier for the end user?

Anyway, I thought I would show my one line solutions for listing and setting the MTU for the VMKernel Nics for multiple hosts,

Listing the MTU for each VMKernel Nic

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Setting the MTU to 9000 for each VMKernel Nic

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The Code

Listing the MTU for each VMKernel Nic

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter | Where { $_.GetType().Name -eq "HostVMKernelVirtualNicImpl" } | Select VMHost, Name, MTU

Or an even easier way of doing this (but you cant expand it to change the MTU easily is:

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostNetwork | Select -ExpandProperty VirtualNic | Select VMHost, Name, MTU

Setting the MTU to 9000 for each VMKernel Nic

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter | Where { $_.GetType().Name -eq "HostVMKernelVirtualNicImpl" } | Foreach { $_ | Set-VMHostNetworkAdapter -Mtu 9000 -Confirm:$false }

PowerShell Summit–My recorded sessions

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imageRecently I was lucky enough to attend the PowerShell Summit at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, this was an awesome event which was focused on PowerShell, it included not only people who are using PowerShell but also some of the people who wrote and designed it.

There were a bunch of great sessions, all of which can be reviewed and slides downloaded here.  I was also asked to present two sessions.  I have included the recordings for these sessions below.  Thanks to Aaron Hoover for recording these.

A couple of comments which I took away from the PowerShell Summit which really surprised me where:

  • A number of people told me they had started out with PowerCLI and then worked back into PowerShell (much like myself).
  • I was surprised that 2/3 of the room when I presented were using VMware, after all this was a Microsoft Conference!

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My VMworld 2013 Sessions

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image_thumb1This year there are some awesome sessions at VMworld, I think people are starting to realize the benefits of automation and how these can be achieved with VMware products.  I am looking forward to attending and hopefully presenting some great sessions at VMworld 2013.

Today is the last day of voting so if you are still looking through the session list and wondered what I had put forward this year then please find a list below, if these looks interesting to you then please feel free to vote for it here!

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Gathering simple pool information from VMware View

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Recently I was asked if we could list some basic information from VMware View using the cmdlets which come installed on the View Administrator server, the request was specifically a list of VMs and the pool they were in, this was easily achieved with the Get-DesktopVM cmdlet as below:

Get-DesktopVM | Select Name, Pool_id | Sort Pool_id

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Automating storage with NetApp Workflow Automation

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Do you wish you could automate your NetApp Storage infrastructure?

Do you wish your storage admins could give an easy to use custom interface to other areas of the business allowing them to provision or use storage however they need whilst still applying best practice and corporate policies to the configuration?

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Relating vCloud Director to vCenter in PowerCLI

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I was listening to episode 216 of the PowerScripting Podcast recently, Hal and Jonathan were talking to vCloud Director (vCD) expert Jake Robinson and “meeting expert” (listen it will make sense) Damian Karlson, it was a great show, very funny and I highly recommend you listen here: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/episode-216-jake-robinson-and-damian-karlson-talk-powercli/

Anyway, they were talking about relating vCD objects to vCenter objects, on the show they said it couldn’t be done without matching an ID and writing a custom function, this used to be the case but now I wanted to show a few cool things from PowerCLI which allows us to use a parameter called –RelatedObject to take away all the hard work from the matching IDs, Datastore IDs, Network IDs etc. Continue reading →

PowerCLI 5.1 R2 Released

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PowerCLIVersionVMware have just released PowerCLI 5.1 R2 and with it are the long awaiting cmdlets to work with VDS!

I worked with these a little and although VDS are not 100% fully covered in this release the cmdlets are certainly useful for most of the things I needed to do and they opened up VDS with the .extensiondata property for the rest of the things I wanted to play with.

Two of the cooler cmdlets where the Export-VDSwitch and New-VDSwitch –backupfile which can be used with 5.1 and the new VDS features to backup the VDS into a simple zip file and re-import it when needed.

I have included the new cmdlets and some examples from the help file below.

As well as the VDS cmdlets I am also happy that VMware now supports PowerShell v3 and vCloud Director 5.1 in both their admin version of PowerCLI and their Tenant version, this opens up vCD to automate some of the cooler new features of VCD and also enable the enhancements made by Microsoft in PowerShell v3.

Download it now. Continue reading →