I thought I would help people learn the VI Toolkit whilst also creating a nice script which you can customise to your own environment, hopefully this is a script that will save you time in the future.

The script we are going to build together in step by step instructions is a Customisation script.

You have built your host and now have to go through the configuration and tweaks of all the after-build areas, you have to make sure that these are setup the same on each host so that things like VMotion and DRS work so what better than a script to help us limit the amount of mistakes when typing names or missing steps.

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This week I gave a presentation to the UK PowerShell User Group at the Microsoft HQ in the UK, this was also available over live meeting and seemed to go quite well, despite the issues with the projectors, wifi, sound and rooms we were in.

For those people who couldn’t make the live meeting or the UK PowerShell User Group I have uploaded my slide deck for you to have a look through.

Download the slides here in PDF format… http://virtu-al.net/Downloads/VMwareVIToolkitPSUKUG27-03-09.pdf

My Presentation followed a nice insight into the 2008 Active Directory cmdlets that are being released by Microsoft, Jonathan Medd gave a great comparison of this and the Quest tools and also showed us a nice demo of the new Recycle bin feature in 2008 Active Directory.

These were both recorded and presented over Live Meeting, I will include a link so that you can watch them as soon as it is available.

A Simple One-liner today but it shows you how to add information along the pipe line to enable new properties which can be formed using other cmdlets or simple math statements on existing properties:

This one-liner will give you the VM disk or partition sizes for each of your VMs:

ForEach ($VM in Get-VM ){($VM.Extensiondata.Guest.Disk | Select @{N="Name";E={$VM.Name}},DiskPath, @{N="Capacity(MB)";E={[math]::Round($_.Capacity/ 1MB)}}, @{N="Free Space(MB)";E={[math]::Round($_.FreeSpace / 1MB)}}, @{N="Free Space %";E={[math]::Round(((100* ($_.FreeSpace))/ ($_.Capacity)),0)}})}

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I have just re-worked an old script which I created to check each VM to ensure they are using the correct HAL based on the amount of processors they have installed, as it turns out I managed to get this into a nice one-liner:

Get-VM | Where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"} | Sort Name | Select Name, NumCPU, @{N="OS HAL";E={(Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $_.Name -Query "SELECT * FROM Win32_PnPEntity where ClassGuid = '{4D36E966-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}'" | Select Name).Name}}

Or to break it down so it fits on my blog…

Get-VM | Where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"} |
Sort Name |
Select Name, NumCPU, @{N="OS HAL";E={(Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $_.Name -Query 
"SELECT * FROM Win32_PnPEntity where ClassGuid = '{4D36E966-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}'" |
Select Name).Name}}

Output:

Most of my work with the VI Toolkit has been scripts so far, well the work that I  have added to this blog anyway, I use one-liner’s on a daily basis to make my job easier.

It was suggested to me that I should add some one-liners to my blog as I’m going to be busy over the next couple of weeks so I had a quick tinker.

This one-liner is quite a simple but long one-liner just to get started:

View the top 10 VM’s which have been using memory for the last 48 Hours:

Get-Stat -Entity (Get-VM | Where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"}) -Start ((Get-Date).AddHours(-48)) -Finish (Get-Date) -Stat mem.usage.average | Sort-Object Value -Descending | Select-Object Entity, Value -First 10

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I was asked by my friend Duncan if it was easy enough to set the Memory Management Unit (MMU) for each of his VM’s.  Read his post here for more information on what he was working on.

He was about to set this by hand for 50+ VM’s which would take a while, so with the power of the VI Toolkit he can now take it easy whilst PowerShell does the hard work:

Get-VM -Name "MyVM" | Get-View | foreach {
    $spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
    $spec.flags = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineFlagInfo
    $spec.flags.VirtualMMuUsage = "on"
    $taskMoRef = $_.ReconfigVM_Task($spec)
}

Get-VM | Get-View | foreach {
    $spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
    $spec.flags = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineFlagInfo
    $spec.flags.VirtualMMuUsage = "on"
    $taskMoRef = $_.ReconfigVM_Task($spec)
}

Get-Cluster "MyCluster" | Get-VM | Get-View | foreach {
    $spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
    $spec.flags = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineFlagInfo
    $spec.flags.VirtualMMuUsage = "on"
    $taskMoRef = $_.ReconfigVM_Task($spec)
}

To list each of the VM’s and their current MMU setting use this one-liner:

Get-VM | Get-View | ForEach {Write "$($_.Name) - $($_.Config.Flags.VirtualMmuUsage)"}