Archive for August, 2009

At the moment I am adding around 50 datastore’s to a host, now whilst I love using the great Virtual Infrastructure Client wizard to do this after adding two of the 50 i remembered what someone said (can’t remember who)….. If you do something more than once, script it.

So guess what I did….

The following script was used to add the datastore’s from a csv file whilst I happily worked on other things.

The csv file consisted of the following:

LUNid,Hostid
101,1
221,2
331,3
451,4
521,5
661,6

etc etc, the naming convention for my datastores is SAN_HOSThostid_LUNlunid so this was easily scripted as so:

$CSVFile = "C:\Temp\Datastores.csv"
$MYESXHost = "ESX01.virtu-al.local"
$VMHBA = "vmhba2:0:"

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER
$CSV = Import-CSV $CSVFile
$ESXHost = Get-VMHost $MYESXHost
$ESXHost |Get-VMHostStorage -RescanAllHBA
Foreach ($Item in $CSV){
   $HostID = $Item.HostId
   $LunID = $Item.LunID
   Write "Creating SAN_HOST$($HostID)_LUN$($LunID)…"
   $ESXHost |New-Datastore -Vmfs -Name "SAN_HOST$($HostID)_LUN$($LunID)" -Path "$($VMHBA)$($HostID)"
}

The New-Datastore cmdlet also has a -BlockSizeMB parameter which can be used to specify the block size of VMFS in megabytes.

All in all it took me around 10 minutes to add 50 datastore’s which I think would have taken significantly longer through the GUI.  Yet another reason to start learning PowerCLI !

Inspired by Jason Boche’s article: http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/08/18/hidden-virtual-cpu-limit-restriction-in-esx-3-5/ and also William Lam’s Perl Script (http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10556).  I decided to re-create this in PowerCLI.

If you haven’t seen William’s scripts, I strongly suggest you check out the Perl Sample code where he stores them here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/codecentral/vsphere_perl, he has been coding mad recently and turning out some really good stuff.

The PowerCLI script gives the following output:

Cluster: Production
Host: vmgesx01.vmguru.com
Misc.RunningVCpuLimit: 128
Number of vCPU on host: 4
Host: vmgesx02.vmguru.com
Misc.RunningVCpuLimit: 128
Number of vCPU on host: 3
Host: vmgesx03.vmguru.com
Misc.RunningVCpuLimit: 128
Number of vCPU on host: 2
Host: vmgesx04.vmguru.com
Misc.RunningVCpuLimit: 128
Number of vCPU on host: 5
———-
Number of vCPU in Production: 14
———-

More >

Firstly I would like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on my previous Daily Report script, I really appreciate the feedback and have never had so many comments !

Now onto V2…

This one will take a while longer to run than the last script but as its a scheduled task we are not really worried about that, we are hardly going to sit there and watch it running !

I think you will agree the results are worth the wait:

What’s new

• Bug Fixes
• Active VMs count
• Inactive VMs count
• DRS Migrations count and list
• Correct NTP Server check for each host
• VMs stored on local datastores
• NTP Service check for each host
• vmkernel warning messages for each host
• VM CPU ready over x%

More >

Ever wanted to check the hosts in your vCenter to make sure they are all the same type, you can use the following one liner to do this:

Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Get-View | Select Name, @{N=“CPU“;E={$_.Hardware.CpuPkg[0].Description}} | Export-Csv c:\cpuinfo.csv

Sample Output:

Or if you want to add the cluster name in there as well:

Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Get-View | Select Name, @{N=“Cluster“;E={Get-Cluster -VMHost (Get-VMHost $_.Name)}},@{N=“CPU“;E={$_.Hardware.CpuPkg[0].Description}} | Export-Csv c:\cpuinfo.csv

Sample Output:

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I have been on vacation.  I thought I would ease myself back in with a quick one-liner.

We had an issue on one of our esx hosts today and when I went to check the logs I noticed the time was out, on further checking the server the NTP service had stopped.

I wrote a quick one liner to double check all our Hosts were using the same NTP Server and that the service was started:

Get-VMHost |Sort Name|Select Name, @{N=“NTPServer“;E={$_ |Get-VMHostNtpServer}}, @{N=“ServiceRunning“;E={(Get-VmHostService -VMHost $_ |Where-Object {$_.key-eq “ntpd“}).Running}}

This will give you a nice table letting you know the state of your hosts time, if you do happen to have a host with an incorrect NTP server then you can set it like this:

Add-VMHostNtpServer -VMHost MYHost -NtpServer ‘ntp.mydomain.com‘

Or if one of the services has stopped you can start it again with the following:

Get-VmHostService -VMHost MyHost | Where-Object {$_.key -eq “ntpd“} | Start-VMHostService

Example output from my one-liner: