Jonathan Medd

 Je ne suis pas Alan Renouf  Today’s theme is simple and practical examples to improve the management of your VMware Infrastructure  What’s New?  Reporting  Useful One-Liners / Short Scripts  Project Onyx  VESI

Buy this book Two ebook copies to give away to those who ask / answer questions

You should also get this Practical PowerCLI examples side-by-side vSphere topics

PowerCLI 4.0 U1 is out!  More than 60 new cmdlets since the last release earlier this year  Cmdlet reference is now online  vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide  Virtu-Al’s summary of the new cmdlets

A few of the new cmdlets  Set-PowerCLIConfiguration - DefaultServerMode multiple  Stop-VMHost Server01 -Confirm (or –whatif) ;-)  Set-HardDisk -HardDisk $hd - CapacityKB $extendedCapacity - HostCredential $ hostCred - GuestCredential $guestCred

PowerShell 2.0 is out!  More than 100 new cmdlets since v1.0  Installed by default in Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2  New features: Remoting, Advanced Functions, Background Jobs, ISE

vCheck (Daily Report)  Schedule this report to run every day in your environment  Have a person dedicated to working through highlighted issues each day – if possible rotate between team members, say weekly 

vCheck

vCheck – New in V3

vCheck Examples - Snapshots  Do you know every old Snapshot you have?  Hassle the Snapshot Creator  Manage those which are required to be kept

vCheck Examples – Too Many CPU’s  Weren’t aware of these until they turned up in the daily report  Could potentially cause some unnecessary high CPU %RDY times  All now down to 2 x vCPU

vCheck Examples – VM’s on Local Storage  Often created ‘temporarily’ whilst waiting for SAN space. Still there months later.  Could effect host maintenance since can’t be VMotioned

Find Host Version and Build  Get-VMHost | Get-View | | Sort-Object Name | Export-Csv C:\Scripts\Hosts.csv - NoTypeInformation Demo: Get-View Exploring

Who’s seen one of these? Or three in one month? Three different servers, same model, same ESX version, same CPU error

Find Vendor, Model and Bios  Get-VMHost | Get-View | @{N="Bios Date";E={$_.hardware.biosinfo.releasedate}} | Sort-Object Name | Export-Csv C:\Scripts\Bios.csv - NoTypeInformation Note: Some vendors don’t seem to be populating this information for all models

SVMotion  Moved entire production infrastructure between SAN’s in different data centres with no downtime simply by scheduling these commands  Get-VM Server01 | Move-VM –Datastore (Get-DataStore Datastore10)  Combine with Import-CSV to make it even easier for large batches  Watch out for VM’s with multiple disks in different datastores if you have multiple target datastores

Slot Size  What are ESX Slot Sizes?  ‘Prevent VMs from being powered on if they violate availability constraints’  Cluster with seemingly plenty of capacity won’t power on VM’s.  Watch out for ‘expensive’ VM’s with CPU or Memory reservations, and / or vSMP

Slot Size Code

Project Onyx from PowerCLI team  Currently in Alpha  Think Macro Recorder for Excel  Best for automating things that can’t be automated using native PowerCLI cmdlets  Beats having to read the API documentation Project Onyx Demo

The VESI  Offshoot from Quest PowerGUI tool  PowerShell scripts bundled up into a GUI interface  Great for beginners to use PowerShell scripts before getting to grips with writing your own  Great for more advanced scripters wishing to share code VESI Demo

Resources     PowerCLI community forum