Category Archives: VMware

PowerCLI @ VMworld 2011

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I have to say, 2011 I think was my best VMworld yet – probably because I now work for VMware and was involved in so much cool stuff but hey – it was Awesome !

Whilst at VMworld I notice a lot of activity on the PowerCLI front, to capture this rather than a normal blog post I wanted to share with you a short video I created, it not only shows you what happened at VMworld but also gives you some great detail on what people are using PowerCLI for.

Thanks to everyone I spoke to and everyone I had a drink with.  Also a big special thanks to my co-presenter Luc Dekens (featured at the end of the video).

vSphere Distributed Switch PowerCLI cmdlets

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For a long time now when presenting at VMworld or VMUGS I have asked the question – What would you like to see from PowerCLI next ?  The standard answer I get at most of these is vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) cmdlets !

Luc Dekens did a great job with his series of posts showing how you could create your own VDS advanced functions, these allow you to add the functions to your PowerCLI session and work with VDS, find them here and take a look, they are a great example of how you can expand PowerCLI to support areas not yet written.

So what’s new ?

VMware have now released some PowerCLI cmdlets as a fling which work with VDS and allow you to do most of the common VDS tasks in your vSphere environment.  Please note that this is a fling and therefore not officially supported by VMware.  Having said that we are definitely keen for you to download these and try them out – please make sure you leave feedback as this will help with future versions !

Requirements

Currently there are some strict requirements around these cmdlets:

  • Windows required XP or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 is required  (Windows 7 and Vista are not supported currently)
  • VMware PowerCLI 4.1.1 or later is needed

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Auto Deploy and Image Builder profile functions

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One of the best and one of my favorite ideas from the PowerCLI team (there are so many to choose from) was to include an initialization script when you launch PowerCLI, this gives us the nice black background, custom prompt and also other things like the Get-VICommand function.

Get-VICommand lists all the VMware related cmdlets added to your session, this is useful for quickly listing the VMware cmdlets you need, most people think this is actually a cmdlet which is part of PowerCLI but if you have ever imported the VMware snapin into a PowerShell session and tried to use Get-VICommand you will quickly realize this is not part of the cmdlet set.

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UKVMUG–Nov 3rd 2011

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For the first time ever there will be a UK wide VMUG and I have to say the organisers have certainly made sure it will be one that is not to be forgotten.  With VMware super stars like Duncan Epping, Lee Dilworth and Cormac Hogan being flown in to give some great sessions and the usual UK crowd it should be a great event.

Also available throughout the day will be a PowerCLI Hands on Lab, come to learn how to get started with PowerCLI, take PowerCLI to the next level or even just to say hi and chat with me and Jonathan Medd about PowerShell, PowerCLI or anything else on your mind.

Event Details

Thursday, November 3, 2011

8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

National Motorcycle Museum
Coventry Road
Bickenhill, Solihull, West Mids, England B92 0EJ

Register

Make sure you register here
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PowerCLI-Man The Return

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True to his word, PowerCLI-Man was back at VMworld Europe, luckily enough I managed to meet him this time too, for those who did not attend the full PowerCLI session you can watch the video below – One question remains though….

Who is PowerCLI-Man ?

North UK VMUG –11th Oct

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image“Ayup me duck” – Sorry, just practising for next week.  For those of you in the north of the UK, if you aren’t already aware there is a “Virtual Machine User Group” next week on Tuesday 11th October.

Sessions will not only include VMware but Citrix, Microsoft, EMC, Netapp, B2Net and many many more – it should be fun !

I will be presenting a session on “Image Builder, Auto Deploy and general PowerCLI”, my session will be from 15:15 – 16:05 in the “Mull Room”.

If you are not yet registered to attend I suggest you head over to http://www.vmug.org.uk/ right now before they run out of room.

For more information on the day please see the below details and schedule of events:

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PowerCLI at VMworld Europe ‘11

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I have just had a quick chat with my good friend PowerCLI-Man and he wanted me to let you know that despite rumours he will be attending VMworld Europe in Copenhagen 2011 – I for one am pleased about this and hope I will finally get the chance to meet him.

He said it was important to point out a couple of sessions to you which apparently will be fantastic:

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Auto Deploy and vCloud Director

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When re-installing my home lab I realized that when using Auto Deploy with vCloud Director (vCD) you would need to have an extra step in the planning process, this makes sense if you think about the way that Auto Deploy and vCD works.

vCloud Director installs an agent on the ESXi host which is used for deploying virtual machines and other operations, if you think about the way Auto Deploy works, any change that is made to the host which is not part of your initial Image Profile or set in your Host Profile will be removed if the host is rebooted, this includes the vCD Agent.

On installing the VCD agent I was presented with the following error:

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So  I did as advised and consulted the documentation and found the following:

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Automated install of vShield Services

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Following on from my previous post in this series where I showed how we could deploy vShield manager into our virtual infrastructure I thought I would take it one step further and show how we can use the vShield API’s within PowerShell to make some nice PowerShell advanced functions which will install the vShield services on our hosts.

Forgetting about the functions for a moment this really does show the power of PowerShell and how we can simplify everything down into a couple of lines of code which can be used over and over.  The last line of this code is all that is now needed to install vShield services on not just 1 host but 100’s of hosts !

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ESXi 5.0 Reference Poster

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During VMworld most people I talked to were either moving to ESXi or excited by the new features of vSphere 5 and were investigating what they would need to do to upgrade and get the latest and greatest.

Those who attended the Hands on Lab were lucky enough to grab a poster bought to you by VMware Technical Marketing, this year VMware were giving out two posters, the first is the “VMware Management with PowerCLI 5.0” poster which can be downloaded here.

The second was a new poster which was designed to help you  move to ESXi 5.0, this is called the “VMware ESXi 5.0 Reference” poster, it includes handy quick references to advise people of common tasks like upgrading to the latest version…

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