As the official download count for V1 of my PowerPack has now hit over 1000 downaloads (I cant thank you all enough), I have now released V2 of my PowerPack for VESI and PowerGUI, this is more like the version I wanted to release first time around.

In the first PowerPack, I took a fair few snippets of code I had written on my blog and added these to the PowerPack to get people interested, now in Version 2 I have added even more content, more nodes, more actions and a fair bit of user requested features.

As you can see from the image on the left, there are a fair few nodes (so many I had to cut and paste the image together as they wouldn’t all fit in one screen capture).

There are also some new actions (see screenshots below).

If you have ESXi hosts you should find this useful, now you will be able to download the current firmware state to your windows machine with the click of a button, deploy it back and also reset them back to default configuration (seen below).

I was also requested to add the vCheck script into this version so you could run ad-hoc reports on customer sites, you will find this under the General tab.

You will also find many more VM nodes, most of which where inspired by Armin van Lieshout who was a great help during the testing phase and even sent through his own code for me to include.  Thanks Armin.

Thanks to the other beta testers who sent me some great feedback (most of which is in here), I couldn’t have done it without you guys !  I also want to thank Kirk Munro who helped me out with a few coding or should I say User errors in V1 of this PowerPack 😉

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I have been teasing people on twitter for a week or so now and have just uploaded my PowerPack to the PowerGUI site, you can download it here

As you can see from the screen shot on the left, this is a first attempt at providing most of my scripts in one PowerPack and adding to the already great management that VESI and PowerGUI give you.

So what do I need to do to install this ?

1. Install PowerShell V1 or V2 (if you do not already have these installed) V2 Recommended
2. Install PowerCLI
3. Install VESI or PowerGUI (VESI Recommended for Virtualization management)
4. If you have PowerGUI installed you will need to add the  ‘VMware Infrastructure Management’ PowerPack which can be downloaded from here.
5. Click the download button at the top of this post to download my latest PowerPack, and rate the PowerPack while you are there if you like !
6. Import the PowerPack into VESI or PowerGUI

From then on you will see both the VMware set of icons and the Virtu-Al icons, you will need to connect to a VI server or number of hosts using the ‘Managed Hosts’ section of the VMware PowerPack, once connected all icons (nodes) become active in the Virtu-Al.net powerpack, simply click on one to see the results.

If you want anything added or find something that doesn’t quite work, firstly make sure you have the latest version of the PowerPack by following this post, if it still doesn’t work please let me know, I am aware of a few bugs and have yet to put any actions in there but please, use it and give me your feedback !

I hope you find this useful !

Following my recent post on Slot Sizes and pointing to Duncan’s great HA Deepdive article I came across a great script today on Hypervisor.fr, he has been creating some great PowerCLI scripts recently and also sent me some fantastic additions to my Daily Report, all of which will be added in the next version which is due out any day now.

Just to set the background I will steel a little of Duncan’s post but please make sure you read his full article and then re-read it until it is ingrained in your brain, this guy knows his stuff.  Duncan’s post reads…

A VMware HA Cluster consists of nodes, primary and secondary nodes. Primary nodes hold cluster settings and all “node states” which are synchronized between primaries. Node states hold for instance resource usage information. In case that vCenter is not available the primary nodes will have a rough estimate of the resource occupation and can take this into account when a fail-over needs to occur. Secondary nodes send their state info to the primary nodes.

Nodes send a heartbeat to each other, which is the mechanism to detect possible outages. Primary nodes send heartbeats to primary nodes only. Secondary nodes send their heartbeats to primary nodes only. Nodes send out these heartbeats every second by default. However this is a changeable value: das.failuredetectioninterval. (Advanced Settings on your HA-Cluster)

The first 5 hosts that join the VMware HA cluster are automatically selected as primary nodes.  All the others are automatically selected as secondary nodes. When you do a reconfigure for HA the primary nodes and secondary nodes are selected again, this is at random. The vCenter client does not show which host is a primary and which is not.

A question was raised on the PowerCLI communities before the days of vSphere asking if you could get the information with regards to which of the hosts were primary for each cluster, a suggestion was made by The PowerCLI master himself LucD to grab the information via a putty session and then present it back onto PowerCLI to use the data.

Now, with vSphere and the updated SDK it would seam that this information is available, so I have modified the script found on Hypervisor.fr to list each cluster and the primary nodes within these cluster as seen in the example below:

This can be achieved with a simple (well kinda) script which will check that the cluster has HA enabled and that the vCenter server is Version 4 (vSphere) and then present the results for each cluster:

If ((Get-View ServiceInstance).Content.About.Version-ge “4.0.0“){
Get-View -ViewType ClusterComputeResource |Where {$_.Configuration.DasConfig.Enabled-eq $true} | Select Name,  @{N=“PrimaryHosts“;E={[string]::join(‘ & ‘,(($_.RetrieveDasAdvancedRuntimeInfo()).DasHostInfo.PrimaryHosts))}}
}
Else{
Write “Sorry this is only available to a V4 vCenter Host“
}

Or if the perl toolkit is your cuppa tea then check out this version from William Lam (Perl Ninja)

I have also added this to a VESI PowerPack which I am in the middle of creating and will publish soon, as you can see from the below: