Tag Archives: PowerCLI

Say goodbye to VESI

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Goodbye old friendOne of the most frequent questions I get asked at user groups or by people who know I am responsible for the community PowerPack is which product should they use, normally the question is PowerGUI or VESI ?

My standard answer was to always ask them if they preferred trains or turtles but the answer is very easy now.

VESI is the product known as any of the following:

  • VESI
  • Virtualisation EcoShell
  • The Virtualisation EcoShell
  • vEcoShell
  • The Green one
  • The one with the turtle

From now this product is no more, you can still download it at the moment but no further development time will be spent by Vizioncore or Quest on this product, but wait, do not despair, there is good news.

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Enabling ESX SSH via PowerCLI

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Ok, I have been living under a rock a little recently, I have had so much going on that my blog and my hands on time has been suffering, sorry for that.

Whilst delivering a presentation on the new features in vSphere 4.1 – Of which there are tons (should have been 4.5 in my opinion), I came across the ability to be able to enable SSH from the DCUI (Direct Console User Interface).

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VMware Session 3: PowerCLI & Onyx

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Following on in the series of presentations (listed below) given by VMware on the 8th October in London please find below the PowerCLI & Onyx slide deck and MP3 file.

Other presentations given:

VMware Session 1: Exploring VMware APIs

VMware Session 2: vSphere APIs for Performance Monitoring

This presentation focused on PowerCLI and Onyx, they skipped some of the easy stuff that normally goes at the start of a PowerCLI deck mainly because the London crowd is used to me force feeding them PowerCLI on a regular basis !

Its a great deck and a good listen on the MP3, some interesting questions and comments made throughout the deck.

This presentation was given by Vladimir Goranov and Yavor Boychev who are both part of the PowerCLI team. (See if you can spot the mistake on slide 7 Winking smile)

The MP3 file can be downloaded from here and the presentation is embedded below: Continue reading →

VMware Session 2: vSphere APIs for Performance Monitoring

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Following my first post located here called ‘Exploring VMware APIs’ which was held on October 8th in London, I have now uploaded the second slide deck and MP3 file.

This time the presentation was on “vSphere APIs for Performance Monitoring”, there were some great tips in here on how to optimise your code and the presenter was fantastic, the kind of guy you could watch present about anything – very theatrical !

This presentation was given by Balaju Parimi and Ravi Soundararajan – make sure you listen to the MP3 which can be downloaded here.

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VMware Event – London – 8th Oct – Not to be missed

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If you are in London on the 8th October 2010 then you could be in for a treat, VMware are arranging a fantastic event, well worth the visit and best of all its free !

The event is called: Managing vSphere in large environments using APIs and PowerCLI

There are limited spaces available so act now or you will miss out, some of the most fantastic minds of VMware will be gracing London with their presence before heading out to VMworld Copenhagen.

Think of this as a taster of the kind of things you can expect from Technology Exchange, the contents are listed below, I would recommend this to any VMware admins who are managing large implementations of vCenter, there will be some great detail in these sessions.

If you would like to attend please send an email to PowerCLIEvent@virtu-al.net with your name and company, this will strictly be on a first come first serve basis as there are limited numbers.

If the API’s are not for you then make sure you read the last session before dismissing this day !

The Agenda of the day is as follows:

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VMware View 4.5 – More PowerShell Cmdlets

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Its probably not news to you that VMware have now released View 4.5, just one of the many cool announcements made at VMworld 2010 – San Francisco.

Did you know however that View now has some PowerShell cmdlets ? – Yeah that’s right.

The Good

I think its great that VMware are putting so much time and effort into PowerShell and giving windows admins a great tool to manage their VMware infrastructure with, one thing I always tell anyone who will listen is that PowerShell is “the glue” that sits in between your applications to enable a common programmatic interface allowing you to glue all these applications together to give you the end results you need, whether it be deploying a VM and then installing Windows and then installing Exchange and then following on to add the mailboxes and patch the server and even send you an email at the end to say its done or simply just adding an “A host” record to a DNS server for a VMHost after installing ESX and patching the host using the Update manager cmdlets.

The possibilities are endless, well as endless as your imagination !

So yes, the point here is that its a great thing that VMware continue to add PowerShell enablement to their apps giving us the freedom to automate them.

With View 4.5 we are given 45 cmdlets to manage our View environment, these are listed below: Continue reading →

PowerCLI 4.1 Poster and Quick Reference Guide

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Recently released on the PowerCLI site there has been an updated version of the PowerCLI Poster, this time the PowerCLI Documentation and Engineering teams have done a great job of updating it into a readable poster and have even added my quick reference guide to it to make it an awesome document.

Included in this poster you will not only find every cmdlet collated into some nice readable sections but also code examples and further PowerCLI and PowerShell resources, download the pdf from below:

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PowerCLI Book Update

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As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!”, Luc and myself started writing a PowerCLI book.
At about the same time I got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist, how could I turn that down !

Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free, I have been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and travelling all over the globe.  The little time I did have spare was spent at home with my family.

As a consequence, our chapter-writing schedule failed miserably, something which I am ashamed of as Luc is doing a fantastic job.

And now, for the proverbial “silver lining”, have a look who agreed to help us out:

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Glenn Sizemore

Winner of the Scripting Games 2010 and vExpert

 Jonathan Medd

Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP)

 Arnim van Lieshout

vExpert

In other words, the book will be now be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” !

Can’t wait to read it 😉

London VMUG – Thu 15 July – Lets get interactive !

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I have been given my normal resident slot at the London VMUG this Thursday, 15th July.

At the last VMUG I showed how vEcoShell could be used to add the graphical interface back onto our PowerCLI scripts and also gave an overview of the “VMware Community PowerPack”, when performing the demo I showed how easy it was to drill down into an object using the debugger in the script editor.

Someone asked me if next time I would give more tips and tricks like this, the kind of tips you pick up without realising it and are really helpful to people starting to learn PowerCLI.

So this time there will be a change in the way my session is presented…. We are going to get interactive !

If you are attending my PowerCLI session at the VMUG this Thursday 11-12, please bring along the following equipment:

I will bring these on a USB stick also but it will help if you are already setup and raring to go !

My plan is to host a ESX host and a vCenter VM and a few other VMs which we can all hook into and mess with, we can all do the same things and learn at the same time, I will have some mini instructions to follow which will help you along the path – think of this as a free PowerCLI course !

We will start off slow and then I will ask you to do a few things on your own, just to keep you awake.

Hopefully it will go down without a hitch, if you are unable to bring your laptop don’t worry I will try and put you in a group with other people so we can all observe and work together.

See you on Thursday and please remember your laptop !

Goodbye Virtu-Al – Hello Community

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This may not be news to some of you as I have mentioned it at both the Dutch VMUG and the London VMUG but anyway, if you were not lucky enough to make it to these because you live in a far away place then please read on…

The Virtu-Al PowerPack is no more – gone, dead and buried – RIP

However, the “VMware Community PowerPack” has arrived ! Yes it is a rename but also there is new content and a whole lot more to come, to give this the justice it needs I have created a landing page for the PowerPack at the top of my site under featured scripts or click here.

On the landing page you can see how to download it, a video showing how to install it and also how you can get involved in making it even more useful – Come on people we are all managing the same VMware software here !

Don’t worry if you don’t have scripting skills, you can still get involved !

And with great people like the below already adding content it is destine for great things !

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Head over to the landing page http://www.virtu-al.net/featured-scripts/vmware-powerpack/ and check out the “VMware Community PowerPack” now !