This is part 4, the last and final post covering what we discussed at VMworld in the PowerCLI group discussion.
As always thanks goes out to Nigel Boulton who’s blog can be found here for helping me out taking such great notes.
Following on from the previous posts in this series, this post will take us through the group discussion held at VMworld this year and expand on the items noted during the session.
This post will focus on what people in the session used PowerCLI for and also the various ways people used to launch the scripts.
Following Part 1 of these posts where we discussed getting started in PowerCLI I now give you Part 2 of the note taking by Nigel Boulton at VMworld in the PowerCLI Group Discussion.
In this part of the session we discussed what resources were available to people using PowerCLI.
As with the previous post I will expand on the notes taken and give you the complete list below.
If you have more resources make sure you add a comment and share them with others.
PowerShell user groups are a great way for people to talk about PowerShell with like minded people and share thoughts, tips and tricks and generally discuss their usage..
If you are in the San Francisco area then now is your chance to get involved, in fact if you are anywhere in the world you can join, they will be transmitting it live over Google hangouts.
The first meeting in San Francisco has been scheduled for Friday Nov 01 at 6:30 PM on the site below so please go there and signup today!
http://www.meetup.com/Northern-California-Powershell-User-Group/events/143718672/
Im a big fan of user groups, I have attended many VMware User Groups and also PowerShell User Groups, these are a great way for people to talk about a particular technology and share thoughts, tips and tricks and generally discuss their usage of the particular product.
Recently I was contacted by Eric Courville who told me he was starting a PowerShell User Group for the NorCal area, he will be starting a group in an area that doesn’t currently have one and is looking for support from the community to attend, talk about your experiences, maybe learn some tips and tricks and general chat about PowerShell. Both the new and the old PowerShell users are invited!
If you are in the Sacramento area and would like to join this event please see below for details:
The initial meetup has been scheduled for Wed Oct 02 at 7:00 PM on the site below so please go there and signup today!
http://www.meetup.com/Northern-California-Powershell-User-Group/
Working with Eric we are also thinking of starting one in the bay area if we get enough Interest, if this is something you would attend in or around Palo Alto then please do leave a comment on this blog post to show your interest.
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…
I am often asked how people can get started with PowerCLI, one of the main places to start is obviously with the underlying PowerShell and how better to learn than from the man who invented it!
Jeffrey Snover and Jason Helmick will be offering a free full day of training which you can attend virtually online, take advantage of this event to learn PowerShell v3 from two awesome guys.
Remember, PowerCLI is a snapin to PowerShell so learning the fundamentals of the language will help you in every aspect of PowerCLI.
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.
Recently the top virtualization blogs were announced and updated on Eric Sieberts page here: http://vlp.vsphere-land.com This is a great place to check out for all sorts of virtualization links.
The great thing about this site is that it also gives us a chance to mess with the Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod cmdlets which allow us to read web information and manipulate it.
First lets grab the data from the site:
$Top50Bloggers = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://vlp.vsphere-land.com"
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.