As the official download count for V1 of my PowerPack has now hit over 1000 downaloads (I cant thank you all enough), I have now released V2 of my PowerPack for VESI and PowerGUI, this is more like the version I wanted to release first time around.
In the first PowerPack, I took a fair few snippets of code I had written on my blog and added these to the PowerPack to get people interested, now in Version 2 I have added even more content, more nodes, more actions and a fair bit of user requested features.
As you can see from the image on the left, there are a fair few nodes (so many I had to cut and paste the image together as they wouldn’t all fit in one screen capture).
There are also some new actions (see screenshots below).
If you have ESXi hosts you should find this useful, now you will be able to download the current firmware state to your windows machine with the click of a button, deploy it back and also reset them back to default configuration (seen below).
I was also requested to add the vCheck script into this version so you could run ad-hoc reports on customer sites, you will find this under the General tab.
You will also find many more VM nodes, most of which where inspired by Armin van Lieshout who was a great help during the testing phase and even sent through his own code for me to include. Thanks Armin.
Thanks to the other beta testers who sent me some great feedback (most of which is in here), I couldn’t have done it without you guys ! I also want to thank Kirk Munro who helped me out with a few coding or should I say User errors in V1 of this PowerPack 😉
This is still a work in progress so if you have any ideas or requests please add a comment to this post and I will try and accommodate them. I have many ideas and fixes to include in the next version so please keep checking back or clicking on that update button !
So, how do you get the latest version, well there are two options…
1. If your machine is on the internet then you can use the “Check for Updates” button as previously explained here.
2. You can download the latest version from here and import it as you did before by clicking the button below.
Now for some more eye candy:
ESXi Node and Actions
Detailed Network Information
VM Shares / Resources and Limits
Great stuff Al. Finally got around to taking a look. Very fast and easy to setup! Thanks
Great work Alan.
Have loved your ideas and have used some of them in my own scripts.
I recently had to check for consistency of VM name and the folders, and extended this to also include checking for .vhdk disks that are stored on different data stores than the .vmx config.
I started with your powerpack function and came across another idea from http://get-admin.com/blog and came up with the following code lines to check the folder names and data stores.
..
$vm = “” | Select-object VmPathName,vmdisks #…
..
$vm.VmPathName = $vmachine.config.files.VmPathName
$vm.vmdisks =@( foreach ($item in $vmachine.Layout.Disk ) {$item.DiskFile} )
..
$PathRegEx = “\[(?.+)\]\s(?.+)/(?.+)\.vm.+$”
$vm.vmpathname -match $PathRegEx
#to separate the component parts and then use -match against the stored regex name
#as in
if ($VM.Name -ne $matches.Folder) {#inconsistent folder name }
foreach ($Path in $vm.VMDisks) {
$vm.vmpathname -match $PathRegEx
if ($Matches.DataStore -ne $VMXDataStore) {#different lun }
So glad you have made the time to put your ideas together on a blog.
Great work !!!
I love your tool, but i´m missing one point…
Maybe you can add in a next Version an report that lists all from a VM used storage (Disks (fore each disk in GB)and Snaphots (number of Snapsots and komplete used storage) ??? This would be great 😉
Thanx,
Buster
@Frank
Another great idea, keep em coming !
Great tools, Alan! I’d love to have the possibility to view (and maybe set) the preferred path for LUNs. I found your script in the VMware community (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/237752), however as I’m not a scripter, I was not yet able to get it running within EcoShell yet.
@Alan Renouf
Thanks. That worked without issues.
Al, any ideas about how to check for stale VM’s using The VESI?
@Aaron
Great idea, I will add this.
Al, great update. This is an amazing PowerPack. I do have one thing that i would love to see added to both the PowerPack, and more importantly, the vCheck script. I would love to have it check on machines that are not set to auto-start with the host reboots. This would be very helpful in my environment.
Thanks for the great work, and keep it up!!
app
@NiTRo
@Maish
@PiroNet
Thanks for the comments guys, im glad you are finding it usefull.
@Justin
Ok, just updated it to version 2.0.0.1, try that. Thanks for letting me know about the error. Alan
@Justin
Thanks, I will look at that and fix it
Great work.
When I run vCheck inside of VESI, I get an error line 388 of the script saying I’m not connected to any servers. Rest of the script runs fine.
PowerPack is becoming de facto THE third party management tool for ESX/ESXi environment. I think you should turn it on as a community think, to add more features and enhance existing ones…
Keep on the good work!
Pingback: Virtu-Al – Powerpack Version 2 Already? « powercli.co.uk
As Always – a Great Job!!
Thanks Al!
Amazing work Al !