I needed a quick one-liner today to help me find out how many HBA’s my hosts had, the following one-liner needs no more introduction:

Get-VMHost | Select Name, @{N="FibreHBAs";E={($_ | Get-VMHostHba | Where { $_.Type -eq "FibreChannel"} | Measure-Object).Count}} | Out-GridView

Output:

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Today a question was asked of me, someone asked how to find out who had deleted a ResourcePool, now im not one to get anyone into trouble but I also cant resist a scripting challenge so here was the process I used to write the following one-liner:

Get-VIEvent | Where { $_.Gettype().Name -eq "ResourcePoolDestroyedEvent"} | Select CreatedTime, UserName, FullFormattedMessage

Ok, so we know that everything we do in the vSphere client produces an event so there must have been an event record, in this record we know that the person is recorded as we can easily create a test resource pool and delete it, this will allow us to test the information we need:

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Recently I have had a few comments on an old post I wrote showing a one-liner to get the VM’s disk sizes for each VM, I was asked if there was a way to export this information into a CSV file.

The easy answer is yes but what you need to do is build up a container and then add each part of the information to the container, this is quite common practice in PowerShell, its a great technique where you can basically build and populate your own information and then just add to it, once you are completed you can then take your container and export it to whatever format you wish, for example:

The one-liner mentioned in my previous post simply outputted the data one VM at a time to the screen, whilst this was great for looking at the information, when we try and export it things start to go wrong !

The new script, below, may take up more lines but is far more efficient and adaptable.

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As the service console is moved further away from the hypervisor, people are finding it harder to configure ESX in the same way as has been done in previous versions.

Moving forward the only way to do this really is by accessing ESXi through the API using scripting toolkits such as PowerCLI or the Perl toolkit.

There are two basic versions of ESXi “free” and “licensed”, the scripting toolkits are limited to read-only access for the free version of VMware ESXi. When the host is upgraded to vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus these toolkits have write-access enabled and provide a scriptable method for managing ESXi hosts. Continue reading →

A simple one-liner for today, I needed to check all our current clusters and ensure all the ‘Production’ clusters were set the same, now we could go to each one and look at the settings but in this wonderful PowerCLI world we live why would you do anything more than once ?

The code is simple:

Get-Cluster | Select Name, * -ExcludeProperty id, CustomFields, ParentId | Sort Name | Out-GridView

The Get-Cluster cmdlet gets all the cluster information and then we simple exclude a few of the items I am not really interested in and then push the output through Out-GridView to display a nice filterable table as below:

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The popularity of this PowerPack never ceases to amaze me, as if it wasn’t enough to have more than 2500 downloads already it was also mentioned by the great Eric Sloof at the recent Dutch VMUG, check out a video of the session here (if you speak Dutch) or check out his slide deck here.

So, I have been working on V3 of the PowerPack and have just finished the final touches.

What’s new ?

To be honest I cant remember everything that is new but as you can see from the left hand node list there are a fair few new nodes which may help in your day to day admin life.

I have not only added my own enhancements but also included a bunch of bug fixes, (thanks Arnim and Luc) and also included some other scripts from Arne over at ICT-Freak.nl

I have re-organised some of the nodes so when you add the latest PowerPack you will receive a prompt like the below:

Make sure you click yes to re-organise the nodes into the new areas.

I have also made a dependency on PowerCLI V4.0 Update 1 so if you do not have that version installed then please install it before upgrading to the latest PowerPack, you will not need vSphere 4.0 U1 as PowerCLI 4.0U1 is backward compatable.

In the latest version of PowerCLI VMware have made the connection methods a million times better, if you look at the code you will now see how easy it is to paste your new code into the nodes and create your own enhancements.

So what’s next for V4 ?  More of the same great scripts, more enhanced nodes, a move towards more actions and less nodes, and I am also thinking about opening this up as a community project, we can all add our own scripts to the PowerPack as a community effort and make this THE ULTIMATE FREE TOOL to have when administering or consulting VMware systems, express your interest via the comments please.

If your not a scripter but would like to see something in the PowerPack to make your life easier also please let me know via the comments.

Use the automatic update feature or download the new version now from below.