Archive for June, 2009

To get VMotion working the networking setup plays a big part, any of the following could cause you big issues:

• A spelling mistake in a PortGroup name
• A missing PortGroup
• A PortGroup configured incorrectly
• A non-existing PortGroup on one of your hosts
• etc

This is why automation and PowerCLI is key to the setup of your vSwitches and PortGroup’s, you could add each vSwitch manually and then create a PortGroup for each VLAN you have trunked to your hosts manually but what are the chances you will miss one, what are the chances you will get the VLAN ID incorrect ?  And you sure do get bored of the wizard when you have 4 vSwitches and around 20 PortGroups !

The following code will take you through copying all vSwitches and PortGroups from an existing ESX server over to a new server, ensuring they are exactly the same.  It sure does save me time !

$VISRV = Connect-VIServer (Read-Host "Please enter the name of your VI SERVER")
$BASEHost = Get-VMHost -Name (Read-Host "Please enter the name of your existing server as seen in the VI Client:")
$NEWHost = Get-VMHost -Name (Read-Host "Please enter the name of the server to configure as seen in the VI Client:")

$BASEHost |Get-VirtualSwitch |Foreach {
   If (($NEWHost |Get-VirtualSwitch -Name $_.Name-ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)-eq $null){
       Write-Host "Creating Virtual Switch $($_.Name)"
       $NewSwitch = $NEWHost |New-VirtualSwitch -Name $_.Name-NumPorts $_.NumPorts-Mtu $_.Mtu
       $vSwitch = $_
    }
   $_ |Get-VirtualPortGroup |Foreach {
       If (($NEWHost |Get-VirtualPortGroup -Name $_.Name-ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)-eq $null){
           Write-Host "Creating Portgroup $($_.Name)"
           $NewPortGroup = $NEWHost |Get-VirtualSwitch -Name $vSwitch |New-VirtualPortGroup -Name $_.Name-VLanId $_.VLanID
        }
    }
}

On my previous post where we counted how many VMs were on each host and the cluster they were in I was asked a couple of questions:

1.  How about listing the number of VMs per Resource Pool?

2.  How can we extend this to get the templates as well ?

Ok, easy stuff (I thought).

Lets take them in turn…

Question 1.  How about listing the number of VMs per Resource Pool?

What you need to remember about this is that even if a VM is not in a resource pool it still has resources available to it which have to come from somewhere so in fact what VMware do behind the scenes is have a hidden resource pool called ‘Resources’ where it places the VM when it is not in any other resource pool.

If you remember this then yes, it is quite easy as below:

Get-ResourcePool | Where {$_.Name -ne “Resources“ }| Select Name, @{N=“NumVM“;E={($_ | Get-VM).Count}} | Sort Name|Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation c:\res-numvm.csv

All we needed to do was to put a Where statement in there to not count the VMs in the ‘pre-made resource pool’

Question 2. How can we extend this to get the templates as well ?

Ahhh, this one is simple I thought, all we need to do is put a count in for Get-Template so the one-liner looks like this:

Get-VMHost |Select @{N=“Cluster“;E={Get-Cluster -VMHost $_}},Name, @{N=“NumVM“;E={($_ |Get-VM).Count}}, @{N=“NumTemplates“;E={($_ |Get-Template).Count}} |Sort Cluster,Name |Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation c:\clu-host-numvm-numtempl.csv

Unfortunately as a Template is basically a special type of VM the cmdlets don’t work like this at the moment, you can not get a list of Templates which exist on a host without delving into the SDK so what I suggest you do is wait until the next version of PowerCLI is released and see if they have fixed this issue. – Current version is PowerCLI V4.0.0.1580

Isn’t it annoying when you are looking for a VM on your datastore and you cant find it because the folder name is not the same as the VM, use the below script and you will never have that problem again.

This script will compare the name of the VM to the folder it is stored in, any mismatches will be output.

I know a regex expert could probably do this better, let me know if you are one

Sample Output:

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Fed up of chasing those people who constantly create snapshots and leave them hanging around for weeks or even months on end ?

You no longer have to do the chasing, just use the following script to automatically find the offending snapshot, find the person who created it, get their email address from AD and send them an email reminding them of their mortal sin.

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Ever wondered how many VM’s you have on each Host? You could manually check it or then again you could let powershell do the work for you:

Get-VMHost | Select @{N=“Cluster“;E={Get-Cluster -VMHost $_}}, Name, @{N=“NumVM“;E={($_ | Get-VM).Count}} | Sort Cluster, Name | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation c:\clu-host-numvm.csv

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Short security principles intro

One aspect of your vSphere environment that shouldn’t be ignored is the built-in security feature that allows you to control who can do what with which vSphere entity.

Internally this is controlled from the AuthorizationManager. This object contains all the properties and methods you need to configure and manage the built-in security system.

The principle how vSphere entities are protected is quite straightforward.

At the basis are the so-called privileges. Each privilege describes a basic action that can be performed on one or more of the vSphere entities.

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In Part1 of this article we had all the roles and permissions exported to an XML file. It’s now time to import the roles and permissions into a Virtual Center.

The script does in fact the reverse of what the script in Part 1 did.

But there were a few “gotchas“ that had to be solved before arriving at a working solution.

Duplicate Names

The script does not take into account that you can have different objects in your vSphere environment with the same name! Which imho is not a good practice in any case.

Should someone have the need for this functionality let me know and I will try to adapt the scripts.

Principals

The script does not create the principals that are mentioned in the XML file. If these principals do not exists in the environment where you want to import the roles and permissions the script will show errors.

Speed of execution

The permissions are set with an API called SetEntityPermissions.

As can be seen in the API Reference Guide this method requires a Managed Object Reference (MoRef) to a ManagedEntity. A ManagedEntity object is the parent object of most of the managed objects in vSphere.

This way of working avoids that there would have to be a separate method for each of the derived managed objects.

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