Author Archives: Alan

About Alan

Alan Renouf has a role of Automation Frameworks Product Manager at VMware responsible for providing the architects and operators of the cloud infrastructure with the toolkits/frameworks and command-line interfaces they require to build a fully automated software-defined datacenter. Alan is a frequent blogger at http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell and has a personal blog at http://virtu-al.net. You can follow Alan on twitter as @alanrenouf.

VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal–iPad App

5 Replies

Do you find it hard to locate the latest VMware documentation ? Wouldn’t it be great if there was an iPad where the documentation and videos could be synchronized to your iPad enabling you to take it with you and learn on the train or wherever you need it. Want no more !

The VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal is now available and ready to download from the app store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vmware-mobile-knowledge-portal/id566387182

Once launched you can easily find the information relevant to you:

You can select the information you need to be synchronized to your device or watch it online when you have an internet connection:

Take the documentation with you:

Watch the technical videos and learn about the new 5.1 features:

vMotion and SvMotion Details with PowerCLI

4 Replies

Today I was asked if there was a way to list the vMotions and SvMotions which had occurred in an infrastructure, not only this but they needed to know which hosts the VMs had moved to, the reason for this was licensing.

Firstly they needed to confirm that certain VMs were firstly setup with DRSAffinityrules as disabled, this one was straight forward in PowerCLI:

Get-VM | Select Name, DRSAutomationLevel

Secondly they wanted a list of the vMotions and SvMotions which had taken place over the last week and specifically the source and destination hosts, a post on the VMware PowerCLI Blog gives us most of this information and was easy to adjust to include the source and destination hosts…

The adjusted script can be found below:

Function Get-MotionDuration {
    $events = Get-VIEvent -Start (Get-Date).AddDays(-7)
    $relocates = $events |
        where {$_.GetType().Name -eq "TaskEvent" -and $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "VirtualMachine.migrate" -or $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "VirtualMachine.relocate"}
    foreach($task in $relocates){
        $tEvents = $events | where {$_.ChainId -eq $task.ChainId} |
            Sort-Object -Property CreatedTime
        if($tEvents.Count){
            New-Object PSObject -Property @{
                Name = $tEvents[0].Vm.Name
                Type = &{if($tEvents[0].Host.Name -eq $tEvents[-1].Host.Name){"svMotion"}else{"vMotion"}}
                StartTime = $tEvents[0].CreatedTime
                EndTime = $tEvents[-1].CreatedTime
                Duration = New-TimeSpan -Start $tEvents[0].CreatedTime -End $tEvents[-1].CreatedTime
				SourceHost = $tEvents[0].Host.Name
				DestinationHost = $tEvents[-1].Host.Name
            }
        }
    }
}


Connect-VIServer MyViServer –User Administrator –Password “Pa$$w0rd”

Get-MotionDuration | FT -AutoSize

vCloud Suite 5.1– SSO Resources

SSO Videos

SSO Documentation

Install vCenter Single Sign On as Part of a vCenter Server Simple Install

Install vCenter Single Sign On as a New Installation

Install vCenter Single Sign On, vCenter Inventory Service, and vCenter Server Separately

SSO Frequently asked questions

List of great Knowledge Base articles from Justin King

vCloud Suite 5.1–Whats New?

Quick Host Profile Reports

3 Replies

Today I needed to grab some quick information on my hosts, which hosts had host profiles enabled, if they were compliant and if not what where the issues ?

With the below script I was easily able to grab this information, as can be seen in the screenshot below:

The Script

$HPDetails = @()
Foreach ($VMHost in Get-VMHost) {
	$HostProfile = $VMHost | Get-VMHostProfile
	if ($VMHost | Get-VMHostProfile) {
		$HP = $VMHost | Test-VMHostProfileCompliance
		If ($HP.ExtensionData.ComplianceStatus -eq "nonCompliant") {
			Foreach ($issue in ($HP.IncomplianceElementList)) {
				$Details = "" | Select VMHost, Compliance, HostProfile, IncomplianceDescription
				$Details.VMHost = $VMHost.Name
				$Details.Compliance = $HP.ExtensionData.ComplianceStatus
				$Details.HostProfile = $HP.VMHostProfile
				$Details.IncomplianceDescription = $Issue.Description
				$HPDetails += $Details
			}
		} Else {
			$Details = "" | Select VMHost, Compliance, HostProfile, IncomplianceDescription
			$Details.VMHost = $VMHost.Name
			$Details.Compliance = "Compliant"
			$Details.HostProfile = $HostProfile.Name
			$Details.IncomplianceDescription = ""
			$HPDetails += $Details
		}
	} Else {
		$Details = "" | Select VMHost, Compliance, HostProfile, IncomplianceDescription
		$Details.VMHost = $VMHost.Name
		$Details.Compliance = "No profile attached"
		$Details.HostProfile = ""
		$Details.IncomplianceDescription = ""
		$HPDetails += $Details
	}
}
$HPDetails

VMworld 2012 Barcelona

My Schedule

EXPERTS04 – Meet the Experts – 04

Tuesday, Oct 9, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Stop by the Meet the Experts Lounge to book time with a Knowledge Expert. They are available throughout the week for casual, one-to-few discussions. Please reference their availability now and stop by the Lounge reception desk in Hall 6, to schedule a 30-minute appointment.

GD33 – PowerCLI with Alan Renouf

Wednesday, Oct 10, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Join me in this Group Discussion on PowerCLI and automation, I loved these in SFO hearing what people were doing and the challenges people had, come have your say ! (Book early it fills fast)

INF-VSP1252 – What’s New with vSphere 5.1 – ESXCLI & PowerCLI

Wednesday, Oct 10, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Thursday, Oct 11, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

In this session Technical Marketing automation experts William Lam and Alan Renouf will take you through What’s New in ESXCLI and PowerCLI for the vSphere 5.1 release. In this session Alan and William will take you through the exciting features available to use when automating VMware products, both beginners and experts will learn how to use new features to make your life easier and more productive.

INF-VSP1329 – PowerCLI Best Practices: The Return!

Tuesday, Oct 9, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Thursday, Oct 11, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM

Building on the success of our PowerCLI Best Practices sessions from VMworld 2011, we want to show you our next collection of PowerCLI best practices. This session will show and demonstrate PowerCLI in all its aspects managing and automating not just VMware vSphere® but also VMware vCloud Director®, VMware® View™, VMware vShield™ and more. Presenting with the awesome Luc Dekens.

Cloud Physics – Its Alive !

1 Reply

There’s a new kid on the VMware block and its Cloud Physics, they have just launched their website and also alpha system which you can sign up for. So who are they and what have they created ?

The who’s who of Cloud Physics includes some of the smartest people I have met, some great guys with not only fantastic ideas but also a history of work with many of the VMware features you are probably using right now.

Check out their about page for a list of people and probably some names you will recognize, and with that technical advisors list how can they fail ?!

What have they produced ?

Their opening beta product looks very impressive, it’s a scorecard based interface to your data providing metrics, logic and industry knowledge to the data from your own system.

Each score card shows your data and give you the information you need to do your job better, data that isn’t always easy to find in the vSphere Client can be displayed in seconds and shown in a relevant way to help system administrators concentrate on the issues or potential issues in their systems.

Try it out

As if there wasn’t enough of a reason to try their system out already, they just gave another one, and its big !

The guys at Cloud physics are also giving you a challenge, if you take part in their challenge you can win lots of shiny apple based products !

What do you have to do ? That’s the great bit, all you have to do is register on their site and start looking around, you will instantly start gaining points. To get more points you can suggest cards, or ways to make this more useful, some of these have already been created so take a look before adding your own.

Surely this is a win/win opportunity ? If you suggest a good idea they may implement it and it will save you time… Win1

If you get enough points you can win a prize…. Win2

You can use their system to look at your current data and often find problems and fixes you weren’t aware were there… Win3 !

I’m checking it out and making suggestions and I have to say, I’m impressed !

The first rule of #NotSupported is…..

3 Replies

This year VMworld is going to be awesome, I have seen some things which are going to blow your mind!

One thing I am really excited about is #NotSupported, this is a group of sessions which were the brain child of VMware’s Randy Keener (@VMRandy).

Historically people have done some cool things with VMware software, often things which it wasn’t designed for or is not supported by VMware. Randy has taken these fantastic use cases and added his own group of sessions at VMworld hosted by some of the experts from VMware and other companies and full of great information you didn’t know was possible.

Are you interested in nested ESXi Environments ?
What else can you do with the SRM SRA ?
Do you need help setting up your nested ESXi ?

To find out the answers to these questions and more come and listen whilst people like William Lam, Duncan Epping and many more tell you the amazing things that can be done with our software that is #NotSupported.

Where can I find these awesome sessions ?

Check out the Community Lounge at VMworld, the sessions will be hosted from 1pm – 3pm each day, for a schedule of the sessions visit this link below – make sure you add them to your calendars as you wont want to miss them, believe me! – More information will be added with the run up to VMworld.

#NotSupported Session List

The Rules

Parkour at Vargas Academy

3 Replies

I never do these kind of personal posts telling people what I’m doing but just for this once I wanted to make a change, I promise this is not going to turn into one of those fitness blogs, actually quite the contrary.

For a few weeks now I have been doing adult Parkour classes (Check out here for more info on Parkour) at my local gym in Scotts Valley, CA. So this week I asked the instructor to take a few videos of the cool stuff we were learning, this is just a quick taste for what we were doing.

If you live anywhere in the Scotts Valley/Santa Cruz area I can highly suggest coming along on a Tuesday night to give it a go, its not even like you are exercising, its just so much fun ! The instructor is amazing and it doesn’t matter how fit, or in my case unfit you are, as you can see, after even a couple of weeks they have you doing some whacky stuff !

I was told, if it aint on the net it didn’t happen, so here ya go….

Parkour at Vargas Academy from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.

Installing vCloud Adapter for vCenter Operations Manager

4 Replies

I had to go through the installation of the vCloud Adapter into vCenter Operations Manager today and although the steps are in the doc I couldn’t get it to work, I ended up following Kendrick Coleman’s post here, although this worked I was later informed there was a much easier way to do this.

Randy Keener who works for DevOps at VMware showed me how to do it the correct (and easier) way, as I was going through this again so I thought I would take some screen shots to make things easier for anyone else who is unable to follow documentation like me !

What’s needed

vCloud Director 1.5.0 or later
vCloud Director administrator account credentials of the System organization
vCloud Adapter – Download the adapter installation TGZ file anonymously from ftp://ftp.integrien.com/

Installing the adapter

Go to the vCOps admin page: http://vcopsip/admin and go to the update tab

Click the browse button and navigate to the folder where you have extracted the adapter files from the original TGZ, select the .pak file.

Click the Update button and click OK to confirm the update

The adapter file will be uploaded to your vCOps setup.

Read (yeah ok then) and accept the EULA and click OK.

Confirm the update by clicking OK.

The installation will begin…

Once completed you will see the update status on the screen.

Now go to the custom web page: https://vcopsip/vcops-custom/

Once logged in click the Admin menu and then support

You will be presented with the Support page

Click the Info tab and press the smallest button in the world, I missed this button so many times !

Click yes to start the describe process.

A confirmation box will appear.

After a couple of seconds you should see our adapter in the list of adapters available.

Configuring the adapter

You should now be able to follow along with the vCOps adapter PDF which was part of the TGZ file from page 17, setting up the adapter is fairly straight forward.

Creating a custom Dashboard

As the installation doesn’t create any dashboards for you I highly recommend visiting Clint’s site and reading his great post which shows how to setup a custom Dashboard here: http://velemental.com/2012/04/12/tutorial-building-custom-dashboards-in-vcops/

Virtu-Al.Net

Virtually everything is POSHable

Author Archives: Alan

About Alan

VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal–iPad App

vMotion and SvMotion Details with PowerCLI

vCloud Suite 5.1– SSO Resources

SSO Videos

SSO Documentation

vCloud Suite 5.1–Whats New?

Quick Host Profile Reports

The Script

VMworld 2012 Barcelona

My Schedule

Cloud Physics – Its Alive !

What have they produced ?

Try it out

The first rule of #NotSupported is…..

Where can I find these awesome sessions ?

The Rules

Parkour at Vargas Academy

I was told, if it aint on the net it didn’t happen, so here ya go….

Installing vCloud Adapter for vCenter Operations Manager

What’s needed

Installing the adapter

Configuring the adapter

Creating a custom Dashboard