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.

VMworld 2013–San Francisco–My View

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Another VMworld and I have to say, one of the best I have been too, the level of energy was huge this year at VMworld both for the speakers and the attendees, I think the Software Defined Datacenter is really a message that VMware customers can not only relate to but see how it is coming to fruition.

Of course my highlights at VMworld this year was talking to customers about their automation challenges and helping them by providing solutions and places to research to find better ways to achieve these.  I also spoke to a lot of customers who had already realized a level of automation not only with the great built in automation areas of vSphere but with PowerCLI, VCO, vCOPs and of course vCAC.

I was lucky enough to present many sessions at VMworld and would like to thank anyone who attended them, a record number of people were in my sessions this year and I personally enjoyed presenting to an all time high in one room for me of 1008 people. (Next step is to try and get on stage for the keynote!)

For those wondering, this is what it looks like to face 1008 people waiting for your session to begin….

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Top 10 Sessions

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North California PowerShell User Group

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Im a big fan of user groups, I have attended many VMware User Groups and also PowerShell User Groups, these are a great way for people to talk about a particular technology and share thoughts, tips and tricks and generally discuss their usage of the particular product.

Recently I was contacted by Eric Courville who told me he was starting a PowerShell User Group for the NorCal area, he will be starting a group in an area that doesn’t currently have one and is looking for support from the community to attend, talk about your experiences, maybe learn some tips and tricks and general chat about PowerShell.  Both the new and the old PowerShell users are invited!

If you are in the Sacramento area and would like to join this event please see below for details:

How can I RSVP and find out more?

The initial meetup has been scheduled for Wed Oct 02 at 7:00 PM on the site below so please go there and signup today!

http://www.meetup.com/Northern-California-Powershell-User-Group/

That’s a bit far for me

Working with Eric we are also thinking of starting one in the bay area if we get enough Interest, if this is something you would attend in or around Palo Alto then please do leave a comment on this blog post to show your interest.

Simple Host Time Information

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Today I was asked if it was possible to pull certain time information from a VMware Host to ensure all hosts were not only using the same NTP server but also the same timezone and that they have the same time.  Obviously this is something that is very important for a number of reasons including security and auditing.

I sent the following one-liner (broken up here into several for ease of reading) and it was just what was needed.

Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Select Name, `
	@{N="NTPServer";E={$_ |Get-VMHostNtpServer}}, `
	Timezone, `
	@{N="CurrentTime";E={(Get-View $_.ExtensionData.ConfigManager.DateTimeSystem) | Foreach {$_.QueryDateTime().ToLocalTime()}}}, `
	@{N="ServiceRunning";E={(Get-VmHostService -VMHost $_ |Where-Object {$_.key-eq "ntpd"}).Running}} `
	| Format-Table -AutoSize

Sample output:

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Back in time: VMworld 2012 – Whats new with vSphere Automation

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Oh how long ago it seams, VMworld 2012 and William Lam and I were talking about what was new in ESXCLI and PowerCLI, I enjoyed presenting with William and enjoyed the session and the demos we did in this presentation, now you too can enjoy the session as it looks like VMware has opened it up for free on youtube.

And don’t forget, I have some great sessions this year around at VMworld 2013 on both PowerCLI and automation at VMware, check these out here.

Thanks to Eric “Scoop” Sloof for blogging this here and letting me know.

My VMworld 2013 San Francisco Schedule

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I’m looking forward to VMworld as always, if you haven’t registered yet then make sure you watch my video on why you should.

Personally its going to be a busy one for me, as you can see from my below schedule but this is all amazing stuff and I cant wait for VMworld to begin.  If your interested in any of the items below be sure to add them to your schedule builder and make sure you say Hi and chat to me about automation and integration in your organization and how I can help you make sure VMware is focused on what you need.

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Updating from ESXi 5.1 to ESXi 5.1 Update1 with PowerCLI

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Recently I was asked by someone how they could do rolling automated updates from ESXi 5.1 to ESX 5.1 Update 1 in their environment using PowerCLI, obviously there are a number of ways to achieve this and William Lam did a great job of showing these in this blog including a piece of sample PowerCLI code.

I figured I would share the code I used to perform this so that others may gain from this experience…

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Disabling Netflow with PowerCLI

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Today I was asked if there was a script to disable Netflow on a VDPortgroup, the below was a couple of quick and dirty scripts to first of all list all VDPortgroups and if they have Netflow enabled, the second was to disable Netflow for a VDPortgroup or a number of VDPortgroups.

This may help with a known issue on ESXi 5.1 when Netflow is enabled: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2042370

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Free day of PowerShell training

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DetailsI am often asked how people can get started with PowerCLI, one of the main places to start is obviously with the underlying PowerShell and how better to learn than from the man who invented it!

Jeffrey Snover and Jason Helmick will be offering a free full day of training which you can attend virtually online, take advantage of this event to learn PowerShell v3 from two awesome guys.

Remember, PowerCLI is a snapin to PowerShell so learning the fundamentals of the language will help you in every aspect of PowerCLI.

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All versions of vCheck now on Github

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Following my last post where I added vCheck for vSphere onto Github so everyone could get involved I was overwhelmed with the number of additions, fixes and edits that had been made by many members of the community, this will really make this script even better than before and a real community effort.

I have now moved all the other vChecks to Github for people to make changes in the same way, you can find these below or from the vCheck page on the menu of this site.

Currently there is a vCheck report for each of the following areas:

Download Link Example Output Page
vCheck for vSphere Click here
vCheck for Exchange 2010 Click here
vCheck for vCD Coming soon
vCheck for SCVMM Click here
vCD Audit script Click here

If you don’t want to get involved by editing the code remember you can also log issues or add feature requests on the Github site by using the Issues menu on the right hand side.

Thanks to everyone for their contributions and remember, if you have used the vCheck framework for your report of anything other than the above, please do get in contact so we can feed it back into the community.