Tag Archives: VMWorld

VMware View 4.5 – More PowerShell Cmdlets

Its probably not news to you that VMware have now released View 4.5, just one of the many cool announcements made at VMworld 2010 – San Francisco.

Did you know however that View now has some PowerShell cmdlets ? – Yeah that’s right.

The Good

I think its great that VMware are putting so much time and effort into PowerShell and giving windows admins a great tool to manage their VMware infrastructure with, one thing I always tell anyone who will listen is that PowerShell is “the glue” that sits in between your applications to enable a common programmatic interface allowing you to glue all these applications together to give you the end results you need, whether it be deploying a VM and then installing Windows and then installing Exchange and then following on to add the mailboxes and patch the server and even send you an email at the end to say its done or simply just adding an “A host” record to a DNS server for a VMHost after installing ESX and patching the host using the Update manager cmdlets.

The possibilities are endless, well as endless as your imagination !

So yes, the point here is that its a great thing that VMware continue to add PowerShell enablement to their apps giving us the freedom to automate them.

With View 4.5 we are given 45 cmdlets to manage our View environment, these are listed below: Continue reading

VMWorld: PowerCLI is for administrators !

The voting is nearly over for this years VMworld Sessions but I thought I would let you know that Luc Dekens (Lucd.info) and I have a session which you can help become a reality just by spending a few moments clicking on a button, if you have ever used a script by Luc and I and wondered how you could pay us back for the time we have spent (Cheques/cash/beer tokens are very welcome) then please hit the button now and come say Hi if you are at VMworld too !

A brief summary of the session

In larger organisations administrating a vSphere environment can cause headaches.

Some of the burning questions you surely recognize

  • Who gave that VM 4 CPU’s ?
  • Who connected the NIC to the DMZ PortGroup and when ?

In this session, Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf will show you how to automate the answers to these questions with the help of PowerCLI.  The solutions presented will show you how the combined strengths of the rich PowerShell command set and the PowerCLI snapin provide you with powerful tools to make this all happen.

Alan and Luc will show you how to take PowerCLI beyond the listing and reporting stage. They will show you how to write and use scripts that will inform you when problems actually.

This session will show several aspects of working with PowerCLI. The classic PowerCLI approach but also the use of the SDK methods when execution speed is required and the use of third party products like PowerGUI, PowerWF or Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to integrate the solutions even better into the corporate environment.

Luc and Alan will show several practical demos to highlight this integration. One of the demos will show for example how easy it is to use Active Directory to find a users email address and send him a message to tell him that his guest is using too many snapshots. If the mail stays unread, the script can try to reach the user via a Tweet.

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PowerCLI: APIs made easy “Project Onyx”

For those of you who are living on Mars it is VMworld, No I am not there but I am trying to keep up with all the information coming from VMworld.

One of the coolest things I have seen is “Project Onyx”

Onyx is a cryptocrystalline form of quartz, but apart from that its also a code name for a cool new app the VMware PowerCLI team are working on.

Project Onyx basically allows you to record what you are doing in the virtual infrastructure client and turn it into PowerCLI scripts, so all those things you wanted to script but never knew how can now be achieved.

The PowerCLI team will be giving this new tool to a select few at VMworld to test as it is still in beta, hopefully a wider beta will be released at some point in the future.

For the meantime why don’t you check out the PowerCLI Blog for more information here (Love the paperclip reference)

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Vote for Freedom vote for me (please)

My only chance of getting to VMworld this year is to win a all expenses paid trip, luckly enough Veeam have launched a competition which I have entered and first prize is a all expenses trip to San Francisco -VMworld 2009.

I always add my scripts to this blog for free and now Im hoping you may be able to help me out by simply voting for me at the following location:  Thanks in advance !

You will need to register to login but registration is only a 2 minute job.

Vote Here !

Come on, we can’t let the woman in a bra beat me (No not you Gabe the other one)!

VI Toolkit Lab @ VMWorld

Whilst at VMWorld I managed to sit in on the very popular VI toolkit Lab, this was one of around 10 labs which were running during the day and people could go up and run through some testing on a pre-built lab environment all for themselves.

This gives people a great opportunity to play and mess with things that they may not get a chance to do in there normal line of work.

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VMTN: Ask The Experts – How did it Go ?

VMTN - Ask the Experts

I wanted to say thanks to everyone that came to see us at VMWorld Europe 2009 in Cannes, and especially the people who asked me some questions.

After a slow start to the first day it picked up and we had a fair few visits from people the second day.  I especially want to thank the German guy who came well prepared, he had a sheet of A4 paper full of questions for me. I think I managed to answer most of them.

 

I had some interesting questions from some other people who I have promised to write a few scripts for, I will post these on my blog, hopefully over the next couple of weeks.

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The Frenchman in Cannes

In one of the VMTN Round table podcasts I was mistakenly taken for a Frenchman as my last name is Renouf and I guess this sounds French to the Americans, whilst I haven’t found a way to re-pay John Troyer for this mistake yet I certainly will.

It would seem that at VMworld I was recognised as ‘The Frenchman’ rather than the guy who writes PowerShell scripts or the guy from the UK, I was expecting this after the multiple blog posts which have been added by people stating that I was French.  I decided to go prepared and the below is the sum of my payback !

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