Virtually everything is poshable
Archive for January, 2010
PowerCLI: Virtual Machine disk usage
Jan 27th
Recently I have had a few comments on an old post I wrote showing a one-liner to get the VM’s disk sizes for each VM, I was asked if there was a way to export this information into a CSV file.
The easy answer is yes but what you need to do is build up a container and then add each part of the information to the container, this is quite common practice in PowerShell, its a great technique where you can basically build and populate your own information and then just add to it, once you are completed you can then take your container and export it to whatever format you wish, for example:
The one-liner mentioned in my previous post simply outputted the data one VM at a time to the screen, whilst this was great for looking at the information, when we try and export it things start to go wrong !
The new script, below, may take up more lines but is far more efficient and adaptable.
Top 10 Virtualisation blogger
Jan 19th
All I can say is WOW ! (and Thank You)
I have been watching and voting in Eric’s polls since I started in virtualisation and never ever expected to see my name up there in lights, and in the top 10 too !
Thanks to everyone who voted for me, I really really appreciate it, this is exactly the reason I write my scripts and do not charge for them (despite pressure to do so) I could not believe it when I was told about this Sunday night, I think I am still dancing around in my head (not suitable in the office).
Congratulations to all other people mentioned in the top Virtualisation blogs and especially to Duncan of Yellow-Bricks.com for taking the Number 1 slot again, very well deserved too !
I really wish I had changed my twitter picture before hand though 
PowerCLI on the iPhone
Jan 19th
Well not quite but the next best thing, I have been putting off getting an iPhone for a while now, I have always been a Windows mobile man starting back with one of the first windows mobile devices around, these were always one step ahead of the other phones when it came to the gadgets and things I wanted to do with a phone.
Recently I have been thinking about getting rid of my HTC Topaz (Diamond II) and succumbing to the iPhone geeks in the office, especially when I saw this…
Sapien Technologies are just about to release the latest version of their iPhone app called “iPowerShell 2.0”, this is a great cmdlet reference, much like my pdf but with all the help files and cmdlets in a nice easy accessible application, how cool is that ! More >
PowerCLI: Scripting ESXi
Jan 15th
As the service console is moved further away from the hypervisor, people are finding it harder to configure ESX in the same way as has been done in previous versions.
Moving forward the only way to do this really is by accessing ESXi through the API using scripting toolkits such as PowerCLI or the Perl toolkit.
There are two basic versions of ESXi “free” and “licensed”, the scripting toolkits are limited to read-only access for the free version of VMware ESXi. When the host is upgraded to vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus these toolkits have write-access enabled and provide a scriptable method for managing ESXi hosts. More >
ESX4 U1 & the Intel 82576 Gigabit Network Adapter
Jan 15th
Previously when installing ESX it has picked up all devices and automatically installed everything needed to use the server as an ESX host, recently whilst installing a new Dell R710 (a great review of the server can be found on the techhead.co.uk site here) I came across an issue where the additional Network Adapter in the PCI slot was not found by ESX.
The R710 has 4 internal adapters which were found as below:
PowerCLI: Automating traffic shaping on portgroups
Jan 13th
I was contacted by someone who needed to automate some changes to their virtual infrastructure, I can never resist a challenge so of course I agreed to help.
He worked for a Virtual Hosting platform who offer hosting at a low cost of entry. Each customer where he works is provided with a dedicated virtual machine, a public IP space in a logical VLAN. As such his platform is currently 9 hosts, 190 VM’s and 60 Portgroups/VLAN’s. The platform is based on HP c700 Chassis with Cisco 3020 gig switches, with each “half” of the chassis trunked back to our core with a 2Gbps etherchannel. Each Blade’s “production” interface is connected to each “half” of the chassis at 1Gbps with originating VM id based load balancing. More >
PowerCLI: Comparing Clusters
Jan 12th
A simple one-liner for today, I needed to check all our current clusters and ensure all the ‘Production’ clusters were set the same, now we could go to each one and look at the settings but in this wonderful PowerCLI world we live why would you do anything more than once ?
The code is simple:
Get-Cluster | Select Name, * -ExcludeProperty id, CustomFields, ParentId | Sort Name | Out-GridView
The Get-Cluster cmdlet gets all the cluster information and then we simple exclude a few of the items I am not really interested in and then push the output through Out-GridView to display a nice filterable table as below:
vSphere Quick Start Guide – PowerCLI and PDF
Jan 7th
In case you haven’t bought a copy of the “vSphere Quick Start Guide” yet and were thinking of buying one, there are a couple of things I would like to point out…
I was responsible for adding all the PowerCLI throughout the book, basically if something is explained and there is an easy way to do it in PowerCLI, we have added a code reference, this enables you to see how much is covered by PowerCLI and also how easy it actually is.
PowerCLI: Shutdown your Virtual Infrastructure
Jan 6th
Imagine your Power intake to your rack has failed, imagine your UPS has kicked in but is about to run out of power, you need to quickly shut down all of your virtual infrastructure…. quick run !
Or, you could let PowerCLI do the work for you and help you safely shutdown your entire virtual infrastructure, you could even tell your UPS software that when it gets to a certain amount of battery life left that it needs to run this script to safely shut things down.
Welcome to 2010
Jan 5th
I wasn’t going to do a 2010 post but its looking like its going to be a great year for me, already so far I have seen two things which have totally astounded me…
Firstly I was mentioned as one of the “Top 5 Planet V12n bloggers 2009” something which leaves me totally flabbergasted, I really cant believe it ! I can think of far more worthy bloggers than little old me ! – Thanks very Much !
(3) 
(13) 
(0)
