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.
Its time for a new challenge! From today I will be leaving Technical Marketing (TM) in VMware and moving into a new role, during my time in TM I have been lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the industry, some which have now moved on from TM and others who still remain.
I have worked on some great projects and presented at numerous VMworlds and VMUGs, it has been great fun and I have really enjoyed my time in TM, but all good things come to an end and its time for me to challenge myself in a new role. So where am I going?
I will be moving into the Product Management area of VMware and working as The Automation Frameworks Product Manager.
In this role I will be responsible for providing the architects and operators of the cloud infrastructure with the toolkits/frameworks and command-line interfaces they require to build a fully automated software-defined datacenter.
I will be focused on the needs of cloud architects, system administrators, cloud operations with respect to automating day-to-day production and consumption of datacenter infrastructure. This includes defining requirements, strategy, and toolkits for command line interfaces, automation frameworks, and event-driven workflows.
I will be helping to define how VMware infrastructure can be optimized and managed using expected-state configuration management frameworks and will be deeply involved in the entire lifecycle of product development for VMware command line interfaces, work with engineering teams on governance of these interfaces, and work with customers on requirements and development of new offerings around operations automation.
An awesome role as I’m sure you will agree, I’m looking forward to starting and talking to more of the VMware customers about their automation needs from the infrastructure. I will of course be keeping this blog going and will keep using and working with PowerCLI as part of this role so don’t worry about my PowerCLI content disappearing.
I want to thank you all for following my blog thus far and promise you that you will start to see even more content here as I progress in my career.
Another VMworld and I have to say, one of the best I have been too, the level of energy was huge this year at VMworld both for the speakers and the attendees, I think the Software Defined Datacenter is really a message that VMware customers can not only relate to but see how it is coming to fruition.
Of course my highlights at VMworld this year was talking to customers about their automation challenges and helping them by providing solutions and places to research to find better ways to achieve these. I also spoke to a lot of customers who had already realized a level of automation not only with the great built in automation areas of vSphere but with PowerCLI, VCO, vCOPs and of course vCAC.
I was lucky enough to present many sessions at VMworld and would like to thank anyone who attended them, a record number of people were in my sessions this year and I personally enjoyed presenting to an all time high in one room for me of 1008 people. (Next step is to try and get on stage for the keynote!)
For those wondering, this is what it looks like to face 1008 people waiting for your session to begin….
I’m looking forward to VMworld as always, if you haven’t registered yet then make sure you watch my video on why you should.
Personally its going to be a busy one for me, as you can see from my below schedule but this is all amazing stuff and I cant wait for VMworld to begin. If your interested in any of the items below be sure to add them to your schedule builder and make sure you say Hi and chat to me about automation and integration in your organization and how I can help you make sure VMware is focused on what you need.
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…
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