HA and DRS Audit
Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman are two of the biggest rockstars in the VMware Community, recently they wrote a fantastic book on HA and DRS, this can be downloaded for a fantastic price from here, if you dont have it then you are not a VMware admin !
But wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own little Duncan or Frank to carry around in our pocket and check our clusters out for HA and DRS issues and best practices – Well now you can – no I haven’t created bobble headed characters, instead I have created…..
The HA and DRS Audit Script
This is a script which was created from the best practices and information in the HA and DRS book, run it against your vCenter and it will check your clusters for information in the book, each part will be shown in a nice HTML report and will give you page numbers and information from the book.
This is not to be used as a replacement for the HA and DRS book, quite the opposite, it is used to compliment the book and tells you which pages to look at for information within the book.
So far I have only read the first 50 pages so all the information in V1.0 of the script is related to the first 50 pages but as I read more I will add more checks and update the script.
Download
The Script can be downloaded from here:
HA and DRS Audit 1.1
Downloaded 2306 times
Instructions
The script couldn’t be easier to run, all you need to do is make sure you have PowerCLI up and running and then follow the below video:
Side note:
Some of you may recognise the format from my vCheck script, stay tuned for a new version of vCheck coming soon with some great enhancements
VMworld 2011 session Using the View PowerCLI cmdlets from another machine
Nice job on this tool Alan. I ran it against 2 of my lab clusters and didn’t see any recommendations. Can I assume that is because the audit found no issues with my cluster configurations?
This would be a great tool to implement with vcheck and the VMware Community PowerPack.
Jas
Jumping in PowerCli for the last month i still have troubles when i get the error from a script that is not digitally signed and won’t run. Do i have to sign it myself? Am i the only one getting this?
Andrea
Reading the help does indeed… help.
To run an unsigned script:
1. Save the script file on your computer.
2. Click Start, click My Computer, and locate the saved script file.
3. Right-click the script file, and then click Properties.
4. Click Unblock.
I wouldnt expect any errors from such a person as you Jason
Thanks for the comment.
[...] yelled: hell yeah! Alan worked on it for a couple of days over the last couple of weeks and this is the result. Alan hasn’t been able to get the full book into his audit script, but knowing Alan he will [...]
Excellent stuff! Although, carrying a little Frank or Duncan in my pocket is something I’ve neither wanted nor considered — that just sounds wrong on too many levels.
Ha ha, originally I was going to put pants but that is very wrong in the uk!
It’s the same in the US. I don’t want those guys anywhere NEAR my pants — but the script is nice and the UI is cool, too. Nice work!
Thanks, I wondered about the GUI as I want to add this to more of my scripts, more complex and less of the orange.
Thanks, that helps me.
Thanks for the script – I have been using many of your scripts in the past. I decided to post now because I found your ability to embed images into scripts to be quite a useful technique (after first dropping my jaw @ the size of the ps1 file)!
Thanks – the image Embedding is cool, lookup “base64 encode image PowerShell” I agree it does add to the file size but also means I can make sure there are no dependencies and it looks good.
[...] VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration, has put together a nice HA and DRS Audit PowerCLI script that can be used to gather information and check for best practices on your HA/DRS cluster based on [...]
Great script. I love the interface. One question though… Why, if both my hosts are at the same build, does it give me a recommendation about not having different build numbers in a cluster?
Yeah I wasnt sure if i should not show them if they were all ok or leave it in just to make people aware – Thoughts ?
My vote is to make it visible only if they mismatch.
It just happened that I patched my hosts two days previous and I thought there may be a problem. I had to double-check I patched them all. It was also strange because that was the only recommendation that was made.
Again, great stuff and keep up the good work. Thanks.
[...] and Alan Renouf have done two great postings on these technologies recently. Alan has created an HA and DRS audit script which checks that your VMware environment meets best practices as laid out in Duncan Epping and [...]
Nice script, some feedback….
I get this warning which I note for reference only …
“WARNING: The specified script block may contain a reference to the ‘$_’ variable. If you want to reference the object being extended, please use ‘$args[0]‘ instead.”
There is a cmdlet namespace collision between Microsoft’s Get-Cluster and VMware’s Get-Cluster. Currently I have solved it at the PoSH line with an alias check and rename in my profile script.
$checkAlias = test-path -path alias:get-vmcluster
if ($checkAlias -ne “True”) { New-Alias -Name Get-VMCluster -Value “VMware.VimAutomation.Core\Get-Cluster” }
For scripts, I generally hardcode the full path for this one cmdlet to avoid this annoyance : VMware.VimAutomation.Core\Get-Cluster