Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks.com has become one of the first VMware Design Experts, I couldn’t let this momentous occasion go without a quick image manipulation especially when you see his VCDX number:
VCDX007
Congratulations Duncan !
I have mentioned it a few times on my blog but now Hal’s excellent book ‘Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell TFM’ is available via Amazon so for all the UK/European readers it means we get better posting prices.
Read more:
Buy it here:
VMware are hosting some ‘VMware Coffee Talk Live Webinars.’
VMware will be hosting some SDK/Toolkit sessions. These will be aimed at people wanting to learn more about the SDK and scripting toolkits available for vSphere and whats new.
They will be hosted using WebEx and they will be recording the sessions, sessions and pdfs will be made available from the Developer Center Blog. Continue reading
Lessons so far in this blog post series:
Lets get down and dirty, by now you should not only starting to become familiar with the way things are working but also probably trying new things out, Great !
Now, as there are multiple ways of configuring your vSwitches/Portgroups and Nics I will explain a few ways that should show you the basics, everything else you should be able to work out from there. As always any questions or comments are welcome !
So, the first thing we need to do is think about how we would configure this without scripts, often when I am writing a script I will write down the procedure a step at a time following it through in the GUI, I will then convert this into a script.
Following my previous post where I gave you a quick review of Hal Rottenberg’s ‘ Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell’ book it is my pleasure to tell you that not only can you now buy the book but you can also see some sample chapters and sample code on the Sapien Press website so head over to the site and sample before you buy.
Believe me it really is a good book, also quite funny in places.
Following on from my last post in this series which showed us how to configure the ntp time source (Customisation: Lesson 1 – Time Source) lets get straight into it and start configuring more advanced areas.
In this post I will show you how to open some of the firewall ports on your host which are needed for various applications and services to talk to our ESX Host.
In the last post we setup the NTP server, I figure it would be a good start to make sure that now we have added the time server to our host we should start the NTP Service or as the Linux type people will know it, the NTP Daemon or NTPD.
So, if we use the Get-VmHostService cmdlet which is part of the VI Toolkit we can easily start our required service. This cmdlet will give us a list of the services on our host and there current state:
I thought I would help people learn the VI Toolkit whilst also creating a nice script which you can customise to your own environment, hopefully this is a script that will save you time in the future.
The script we are going to build together in step by step instructions is a Customisation script.
You have built your host and now have to go through the configuration and tweaks of all the after-build areas, you have to make sure that these are setup the same on each host so that things like VMotion and DRS work so what better than a script to help us limit the amount of mistakes when typing names or missing steps.
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4 has been released, find the official download link here and the documentation here.
This week I gave a presentation to the UK PowerShell User Group at the Microsoft HQ in the UK, this was also available over live meeting and seemed to go quite well, despite the issues with the projectors, wifi, sound and rooms we were in.
For those people who couldn’t make the live meeting or the UK PowerShell User Group I have uploaded my slide deck for you to have a look through.
Download the slides here in PDF format… http://virtu-al.net/Downloads/VMwareVIToolkitPSUKUG27-03-09.pdf
My Presentation followed a nice insight into the 2008 Active Directory cmdlets that are being released by Microsoft, Jonathan Medd gave a great comparison of this and the Quest tools and also showed us a nice demo of the new Recycle bin feature in 2008 Active Directory.
These were both recorded and presented over Live Meeting, I will include a link so that you can watch them as soon as it is available.
A Simple One-liner today but it shows you how to add information along the pipe line to enable new properties which can be formed using other cmdlets or simple math statements on existing properties:
This one-liner will give you the VM disk or partition sizes for each of your VMs:
ForEach ($VM in Get-VM ){($VM.Extensiondata.Guest.Disk | Select @{N="Name";E={$VM.Name}},DiskPath, @{N="Capacity(MB)";E={[math]::Round($_.Capacity/ 1MB)}}, @{N="Free Space(MB)";E={[math]::Round($_.FreeSpace / 1MB)}}, @{N="Free Space %";E={[math]::Round(((100* ($_.FreeSpace))/ ($_.Capacity)),0)}})}