I was listening to episode 216 of the PowerScripting Podcast recently, Hal and Jonathan were talking to vCloud Director (vCD) expert Jake Robinson and “meeting expert” (listen it will make sense) Damian Karlson, it was a great show, very funny and I highly recommend you listen here: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/episode-216-jake-robinson-and-damian-karlson-talk-powercli/

Anyway, they were talking about relating vCD objects to vCenter objects, on the show they said it couldn’t be done without matching an ID and writing a custom function, this used to be the case but now I wanted to show a few cool things from PowerCLI which allows us to use a parameter called –RelatedObject to take away all the hard work from the matching IDs, Datastore IDs, Network IDs etc. Continue reading →

VMware have just released PowerCLI 5.1 R2 and with it are the long awaiting cmdlets to work with VDS!

I worked with these a little and although VDS are not 100% fully covered in this release the cmdlets are certainly useful for most of the things I needed to do and they opened up VDS with the .extensiondata property for the rest of the things I wanted to play with.

Two of the cooler cmdlets where the Export-VDSwitch and New-VDSwitch –backupfile which can be used with 5.1 and the new VDS features to backup the VDS into a simple zip file and re-import it when needed.

I have included the new cmdlets and some examples from the help file below.

As well as the VDS cmdlets I am also happy that VMware now supports PowerShell v3 and vCloud Director 5.1 in both their admin version of PowerCLI and their Tenant version, this opens up vCD to automate some of the cooler new features of VCD and also enable the enhancements made by Microsoft in PowerShell v3.

Download it now. Continue reading →

Today I was asked if there was a way to list the vMotions and SvMotions which had occurred in an infrastructure, not only this but they needed to know which hosts the VMs had moved to, the reason for this was licensing.

Firstly they needed to confirm that certain VMs were firstly setup with DRSAffinityrules as disabled, this one was straight forward in PowerCLI:

Get-VM | Select Name, DRSAutomationLevel

Secondly they wanted a list of the vMotions and SvMotions which had taken place over the last week and specifically the source and destination hosts, a post on the VMware PowerCLI Blog gives us most of this information and was easy to adjust to include the source and destination hosts…

The adjusted script can be found below:

Function Get-MotionDuration {
    $events = Get-VIEvent -Start (Get-Date).AddDays(-7)
    $relocates = $events |
        where {$_.GetType().Name -eq "TaskEvent" -and $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "VirtualMachine.migrate" -or $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "VirtualMachine.relocate"}
    foreach($task in $relocates){
        $tEvents = $events | where {$_.ChainId -eq $task.ChainId} |
            Sort-Object -Property CreatedTime
        if($tEvents.Count){
            New-Object PSObject -Property @{
                Name = $tEvents[0].Vm.Name
                Type = &{if($tEvents[0].Host.Name -eq $tEvents[-1].Host.Name){"svMotion"}else{"vMotion"}}
                StartTime = $tEvents[0].CreatedTime
                EndTime = $tEvents[-1].CreatedTime
                Duration = New-TimeSpan -Start $tEvents[0].CreatedTime -End $tEvents[-1].CreatedTime
				SourceHost = $tEvents[0].Host.Name
				DestinationHost = $tEvents[-1].Host.Name
            }
        }
    }
}


Connect-VIServer MyViServer –User Administrator –Password “Pa$$w0rd”

Get-MotionDuration | FT -AutoSize