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…
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
Are you still not registered for VMworld? Why not?!
Let me tell you why I think you should sign up right now and make sure you attend the best event of the year…
Click here to find out more about VMworld 2013 and register.
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.
Anyone who reads my blog will know how useful PowerCLI is for retrieving information from vCenter and easily creating complex reports, something that has historically been hard to achieve from the vSphere Client or web client.
Recently I have been looking at Cloud Physics and their offering in this area, they have a great solution which allows you to offload your data to their website and have the ability to quickly analyze it and view cards of information and potential issues you didn’t even know you had.
This blog post is not to give you an in depth view into their solution, it is purely to advise you to attend their upcoming webex where Irfan Ahmad, CTO of CloudPhysics will take you through their solution and show you some of the cool benefits of their product.
Personally I think this is a great solution and offers so many benefits for reporting and analysis of your vSphere environments.
After making the recent changes to vCheck I was astounded by the amount of responses I received and the help that the community has put back into this script, I am constantly receiving new plugins and code fixes for the existing plugins.
In fact I receive so many that I am unable to add them back into the script and update it to the latest version as believe it or not – I have a day job and a family to entertain at night 
So what to do?
I didn’t want all these great additions getting lost and also I didn’t want duplication of people fixing the same issues all the time so I wanted an easy way for people to contribute and still have the script easily available for everyone to download and benefit from.
Following on from a post I created a while back which gave you a couple of new functions to use with Auto Deploy I wanted to add a few extra pieces of code which I use on a regular basis that may save people time when they are building out their image profiles or working with auto deploy:
Adding the VMware hosted software depots to your PowerCLI Session:
Add-EsxSoftwareDepot https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
Listing the 5 most recent image profiles from the online depot (Thanks to Andreas Peetz):
Get-EsxImageProfile | Sort-Object -Descending -Property @{Expression={$_.Name.Substring(0,10)}},@{Expression={$_.CreationTime.Date}},Name | Select -first 5 | FT -AutoSize
List the latest image profile which includes VMTools:
vSphere Replication was introduced with vSphere 5.0 and SRM 5.0 providing a way for customers without the ability to leverage storage array replication to utilize Site Recovery Manager (SRM) within their environments as their disaster recovery solution.
With the release of vSphere 5.1 vSphere Replication also became available as a standalone replication solution included with Essentials Plus and higher vSphere license editions. Customers now have the option of deploy vSphere Replication on its own to provide basic per-VM replication for use cases where SRM’s advanced DR orchestration capabilities were not applicable.
As adoption of vSphere Replication is growing amongst the vSphere 5.1 customer base so has the number of requests for ideas, hints and tips on what kind of reporting could be added to provide usage information for the various events that could occur amongst a collection of replicated VM’s.
Some examples would be:
The number of customers asking for this kind of information led to this blog being written and the scripts being created in conjunction with Lee Dilworth who is a Principal Systems Engineer with VMware and SRM expert.
In this initial article we have included some scripts that will provide the Continue reading
Yesterday I finally received my Pebble which I ordered a while back when they were in their Kickstarter phase of “Should we do this?” – I for one am glad they did as it’s a great device!
For those of you who are not aware, a Pebble is a cool watch witch uses Bluetooth to connect to your iPhone or Android phone and allow you to do cool things like…
Recently when at the Western Pennsylvania VMUG I was asked by Rob Velarde if I had tried Show-Command with PowerCLI, I know that PowerCLI5.1 R2 now supports PowerShell V3 where the Show-Command cmdlet was introduced so thought I would take a look.
Looking at a cmdlets syntax can be complicated for people who are new to PowerShell and PowerCLI, the below is an example of the New-VM cmdlet…
So what does all this mean?