Map your VI using Netmap at 13:20

At the UK Powershell user group James used Netmap, I was intrigued with this and what it could do, with a few lines to integrate this into the VI toolkit I managed to get a nice map of which VM's were on each host.

Download Netmap here and try it for yourself....

Connect-VIServer yourserver
$vmhs = Get-VM

$myCol = @()
ForEach ($vmh in $vmhs)
{
$myobj = "" | select-Object source, target
$myobj.source = $vmh.host
$myobj.target = $vmh.Name
$myCol += $myobj
}

$mycol | Export-Csv .\Temp.csv
Import-Csv .\Temp.csv | show-netmap

Im also working on a Visio script which will produce a much more pleasing to the eye report...Watch this space and let me know if you would like to test it for me in its early phases.

WSUS PowerGUI Powerpack at 12:13

Jonathan Medd has done it again, yet another great PowerPack for PowerGUI, following on from his Exchange 2003 PowerPack he has created a WSUS PowerPack.

This is still a work in progress project but it looks great to me.

WSUS Administrators can now access their servers using Powershell! Get access to information not accessible from the WSUS console.

Take advantage of the PowerGUI reporting actions to increase your ability to report on info direct from WSUS.

The tool could also prove a useful information gathering tool for a consultant going to examine an unfamiliar WSUS installation.

PowerScripting Podcast at 12:04

Ok, I have blogged about this before but am going to again, one of the most valuable resources I have found for learning powershell is podcasts, there are two PowerShell podcasts out there at the moment that I listen to, Get-Scripting by Jonathan Medd and The PowerScripting podcast by Jonathan Walz & Hal Rottenberg.

I started off listening to the latest episodes when I began with Powershell and then it was mentioned to me that the earlier episodes were great for newbies.

I have now been listening to the back catalogue of episodes (Currently they are up to number 42) and have found them a great resource for both learning PowerShell and keeping up to date with all the third party products, news and tips.

Recently they have also started recording the show whilst using ustream which makes the whole experience far more interactive for us the users of powershell.

With recent guests such as 'The Iron man' aka Jeff Hicks and 'Green Arrow' aka Greg Shields I was left wondering who the presenters could be in there nightly fighting of crime ?!?

The only possible answer I could come up with was Batman and Robin, and I'm sorry Hal you have to be Robin as anyone who has listened to the earlier shows knows that Jonathan started fighting crime far earlier than you !

For anyone who has not yet listened to the shows, please go ahead and download them at the PowerScripting site and learn from the Powershell Guru's today.

Get-Busy Scripting !

Update: Hal has now become a MVP for his work in Powershell, Nice one Hal ! Also in the recent podcast they confirmed that if they were to be super heroes it would be someone from Heroes, personally I think they better suite Batman and Robin fighting the evil Javascript and Perl bad guys :)

(P.S. Any thought's on both Javascript and Perl are that of my own and not any reference to anything from the podcast)

VM'08 UK Virtualisation Event at 16:27

Its not VMWorld but hey, its good for anyone in the uk. I will be there on Thursday (Thanks Joes) 2nd Oct.

The impact of Virtualisation on the IT function is decisive and offers unparalleled opportunities for the enterprise from efficiency gains to cost reduction. This vendor neutral event will give you the opportunity to compare the offerings of over 45 vendors and evaluate nearly 100 products in two productive days. In addition seminar and keynote programmes will help you and your team learn about the latest trends and products.

Check out more here.....VM'08

VMware Server 2.0 GA and Workstation Released at 15:56

Looks like its time to upgrade Workstation and Server if you use them, find more details over on Erics blog:

• VMware Server 2.0 GA

• VMware Workstation 6.5 Released

Microsoft Hot on VMware's Trail at 15:52

Apparently....

Microsoft is aggressively scaling up its virtualization portfolio to tackle VMware's dominance in the virtualization space. Its strategy is the usual one it swears by; to benefit from cross-sell by offering an integrated portfolio of products aimed at virtualizing the entire array of server, application, storage and presentation in the enterprise.

It will launch two new products within the next one month called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Hyper-V Server 2008 allows customers to consolidate Windows or Linux workloads onto a single physical server.

The virtual machine manager will enable customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Microsoft or VMware virtual platforms.

Microsoft will make available the Hyper-V 2008 server software free of cost. It will be downloadable via the web, free.......read more

UK Powershell User Group at 12:57

I had my first experience of the UK Powershell Users Group last night, based out of the Microsoft Campus in Reading.

First to speak was James O'Neil who took us through the powershell cmd-lets he had written for managing Hyper-V through powershell which can be downloaded here for free, he went into some very detailed WMI tasks he had written to perform this and some tips and tricks using WMI and mapping the connections using Netmap

At times a little over my head but very useful and clearly a man who now knows WMI inside out !

After the masses of Pizza that was available due to people not turning up we then continued with Jonathan Medd (Creator of Get-Scripting blog and great Podcast) took us through his PowerGUI management tools for Exchange 2003.

Very Impressive, thanks to Jonathan's neat tool you can now integrate Powershell into managing Exchange 2003 and quickly gain stats and perform admin tasks on Exchange, something which Microsoft have only released for Exchange 2007. Jonathan gave a detailed presentation showing off the features of both PowerGui and his tool he had written.

Until know I have always skipped the PowerGui side of things just to use the script editor to edit my scripts, I may even create my own PowerGui power pack including some of the scripts I use on a daily basis.

All in all it was a great meeting and I suggest more people attend, as well as the great presentations there was also the attendance of Richard Siddaway (MVP) and some other Powershell GURU's who made for great conversation. We also received some freebies and a random draw gave one of the guys a free Powershell book.

The next one is being scheduled for November and I would highly recommend attending if you can.

VSM: VMWorld 2008 Videos at 13:25

Lots of cool VMworld 2008 Viedos have been posted on Virtual Strategy Magazine.....

• VSM TV - VMworld 2008: Pano Logic Demo
• VSM TV - VMworld 2008: VirtualComputer Demo
• VSM TV - VMworld 2008: VMBuilder Demo
• VSM TV - VMworld 2008: FastScale Demo
• VSM TV - VMworld 2008: InstallFree Demo
• VSM TV - VMworld 2008: Hyper9 Demo
  

Checking logs at 10:34

Ok, so its monday morning, I come in and there are an onslaught of emails (no change there) from some issues over the weekend.

It would seem there was 'an issue with vmware' and the virtual machines were restarting left right and center, imediately I think....Network issue.

To find the answer (for which I was correct) I used the following quick bit of code...

Connect-VIServer myviserver
$esx = Get-VMHost myhost
$log = Get-Log -Key "vmkernel" -VMhost $esx
$log.entries > c:\logs.txt

This showed that the service console nic had lost connection to the network, confirmed around 1hr later from our networks team saying the primary core had re-booted itself :)

Microsoft - Just plain nasty at 13:52

OK, until now I have had respect for Microsoft, I have just read this article and a few others and I have to say, that's completely below the belt, they are resulting to nasty underhand tactics to try and steal the virtualisation market.

Just proves that they cant do it with there software which is more comparable to VMware workstation than VI.

I cant wait for VI4 to come out and really kick some butt.

Rant over !

I would be interested in what your thoughts are on this subject.

Virtually at VMWorld 2008 at 08:47

I have to say Eric has done an amazing job of reporting what is going on at VMWorld 2008, for those of us not lucky enough to attend, I don't know anyone from the UK who could justify it.

Check out Eric's blog for Video's, Pictures and lots of great information.....

• NTPRO.NL

VMworld 2008 | PowerShell presentation from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

More VI4 at 21:30

Check out the following link which offers some nice VI4 videos explaining the following features:

• VMware Fault Tolerance

• VMware DVS

• Host Profiles

Datastore Capacity at 23:12

I was asked if there was a way to create a graph for Datastore usage, after messing for 5 minutes I came up with the following......

Virtual Datacenter Operating System at 11:29

VMWare has made its first anouncement of the week, expect many more with VMWorld starting today....

Virtual Datacenter Operating System

The traditional IT stack with its tight coupling of software and hardware falls short of supporting customers’ needs. The accelerating rate of business change, non-negotiable requirements for 24X7 business resiliency and inexorable pressure to reduce cost are increasing the pressure on IT. At the same time, IT has dramatic opportunity to change the status quo by leveraging the immense power and attractive economics of x86 hardware, the maturing of virtualization technologies, increasing choice in new application architectures and the availability of vast new clouds of cheap and readily accessible computing power.

Check out more information from VMware and Scott Lowe

Its coming...VI4 at 22:05

Looks like VI4 is on the horizon and coming soon, there is a beta out there at the moment for a select few, some new features include:

• 64bit kernel and console operating system (COS)
• clustered VirtualCenter Servers
• ESX hosts profile management
• cross-hosts virtual networking
• 8-way virtual SMP
• virtual machines fault tolerance across multiple hosts (the famous Continuous Availability presented last year)
• VMs and media library
• alarms on physical hardware faults
• access control on storage resources
• configuration change tracking
• full support for SATA local storage

Read more information here

MS to buy Citrix ?! at 09:19

Probably not but.....

An interesting link here http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=83

15/9/08 Update: Yet another false rumor.... Check here for the full story

Powershell: Print server details at 10:39

Scenario: I was performing some maintenance on one of the print servers where I currently work, we needed to take the server down for a period of time.

The help desk wanted to send an email to the users telling them that the users of PrintServer1 would not be able to print during this period.

Would you know which print server your printer is attached to ? Would the users ?

Answer: With the following powershell one liner we were able to tell the users which printers would be unavailable for that period of time:

"PrintServer1" | ForEach-Object{get-wmiobject -computername $_ Win32_Printer | select-object Caption, Location} | Export-Csv "C:\PrintServer1.csv"

Powershell SVMotion at 18:49

Nice upload by Hal here that allows you to SVMotion VMs in Powershell....

VI Toolkit Competition Winners at 15:07

I might not have won but at least I get a mug and a T-shirt, check the honorable mentions!

http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2008/09/announcing-the.html

Have to say I can see why the second place reporting script was in the winning slots but I'm not sure people really want to install that much extra to get a report, I think our reports were aiming at two different audiences.

Well done to the winners, great job.

Also I had a really nice mention on Carter Shanklin's blog here....

http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2008/09/and-the-winner.html

If you ask me, thats better than winning (although VMworld would have been nice :))

VI Errors one-liner at 13:41

A quick one-liner that would be usefull in an email to you each morning via a scheduled task....

For the whole VI....

Get-VIEvent -Type Error | Format-Table CreatedTime, FullFormattedMessage

For a specific cluster...

Get-Cluster "MYCLUSTER" | Get-VIEvent -Type Error | Format-Table CreatedTime, FullFormattedMessage

I might even do a daily health check script which gives you performance stats and errors, complete with email options and instructions on how to setup as a scheduled task, please let me know if this will be usefull.

Find this and other great one-liners here

VMware shares about to go down again ? at 10:31

Apparently confirmation has been recieved from a trusted source of virtualisation.info that VMware co-founder and Chief Scientist Mendel Rosenblum has resigned.

His wife, Diane Greene, that founded the company with him and led it as CEO since 1998 was removed by the board of directors in July for much unclear reasons. After that, the risk that his husband would follow was very high.

VMware told virtualization.info that Rosenblum took a month of vacation immediately after that meeting, and this delayed the decision to leave the company.

Also, maybe fearing an impact on the upcoming VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, VMware may have requested to postpone the resign until the event registration was almost complete: this year VMworld achieved a ground-breaking record of 14,000 delegates so there’s no more need to wait.

While Diane Green was the keeper of the VMware culture and engineering tradition, Rosenblum was recognized as the company visionary, designing technologies to be implemented in the next few years.
For example, the upcoming security APIs called VMsafe, which has the potential to change the way we secure the data centers, were developed by the scientist in 2002.

virtualization.info was told that Rosenblum will go back to the university where he and his wife started VMware: Stanford.

With him VMware has already lost three key leaders.
The third one is the Executve Vice President of R&D, Richard Sarwal, who left just last week to go back to Oracle. Now it seems clear why.

This departure comes at the worst moment: yesterday Microsoft officially presented its competing product, Hyper-V, and while the hypervisor is still years behind the VMware technology, the entire industry announced support for it.
VMware will need a solid strategy to counter that: cutting-edge technologies rarely wins against marketing war-machines and ubiquitous alliances.

VI Powershell Toolkit Update 1 at 08:52

Following the poll which has been on the VMware communities for the last couple of weeks an updated toolkit has been released.

This was released due to some of the forum members and users of the VI toolkit finding slowness issues with the get-vm command.

Download the update here for improved performance

Technet Oct magazine focused on MS virtualization at 11:13

Virtualization: An Introduction to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008

The introduction of Hyper-V makes virtualization an even more compelling solution for IT environments. Get an overview of today’s virtualization market and see how Hyper-V improves the manageability, reliability, and security of virtualization Rajiv Arunkundram

Virtualization: Manage Your Virtual Environments with VMM 2008

System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides a consolidated interface for managing your virtual infrastructure. The latest version adds support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, as well as for VMware virtual machines. Explore the new features and get an overview of using VMM to centralize your management tasks. Edwin Yuen

Virtualization: Getting Started with Microsoft Application Virtualization

Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) allows you to deliver virtualized desktops to client systems throughout your organization. This simplifies system management and liberates employees from their desktops. Take a close look at how App-V works and discover how you can deploy it in your organization. Anthony Kinney

Virtualization: Achieving High Availability for Hyper-V

Consolidating servers onto fewer physical machines has many advantages, but it is extremely important that you plan for your systems to be highly available. Here’s a guide to using Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering to bring high availability to your Hyper-V virtual machines. Steven Ekren

Virtualization: Backup and Disaster Recovery for Server Virtualization

Virtualization brings significant changes to disaster recovery. Here’s an introduction to how the Microsoft virtualization platform factors into your disaster recovery plan, as well as a deeper look into backup and restore options and considerations for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Adam Fazio

Virtualization: Essential Tools for Planning Your Virtual Infrastructure

Is your infrastructure ready for virtualization? The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, a network-wide infrastructure assessment tool, can help you better understand your IT infrastructure and determine whether your systems are ready for upgrade or migration to a variety of technologies, including virtualization. Jay Sauls and Baldwin Ng

More information

PowerGUI Powerpack contest at 15:51

Congratulations to all the PowerGUI competition winners and especially Jonathan Medd, our very own UK Powershell GURU !

Check out the winners here

I dont have time to learn PowerShell..... at 12:22

Rubbish !

I heard on one of the pod casts about this website so I thought I would blog about it for all of my sysadmin friends who claim they do not have time to learn PowerShell.

The important thing to remember is that if you follow these and start using PowerShell you will be saving time in the future, and believe me you will be saving alot of time.

The important thing to remember about PowerShell is that it isn't only there for the scripts its also there for the simple commands that you don't need to write massive scripts for.

For example if you need information about how much memory each server has and what domain it is in and what make the server is and you have the names in a text file then this simple one-liner can get that for you....

Get-Content C:\Servers.txt |Foreach-object {Get-WmiObject -class Win32_ComputerSystem -computername $_} | Format-Table Name, Domain, Model, TotalPhysicalMemory

Now think about how much time it would take you to rdp to each server and gather this information ?!?

Seriously, get learning.....

Learning Powershell in your lunch break Episode 1 - Getting Organized
Learning Powershell in your lunch break Episode 2 - Writing Scripts and Translating VBScript
Learning Powershell in your lunch break Episode 3 - Discovering objects (COM, WMI & ADSI)
Learning Powershell in your lunch break Episode 4 - Ins and Outs of the Windows Registry
Learning Powershell in your lunch break Episode 5 - Using WMI
Learning Powershell in your lunch break Episode 6 - ADSI Connecting to Domains/Computers and Binding Objects
Learning Powershell in your lunch break Episode 7 - Manage Users

I dare you to go through these and then not use PowerShell !

VI PowerScripter at 17:29

Hal just pointed me to a new VI Client Plugin that integrates powershell into the VI Console, looks neat...

Download here

comasoft® VI PowerScripter (currently beta 1) is the first and absolutely unique VMware VI Client plug-in for a tight integration of user-defined PowerShell scripts into the object repository of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

This plug-in delivers some predefined scripts for common admin tasks and is capable of handling hundreds of custom scripts for direct usage from a dynamically generated context menu within VI Client (for connections to VirtualCenter, ESX 3.5 or ESX 3i).

Thanks to its absolute flexibility, this powerful software is a “must” for professional users looking to administrate the virtual infrastructure in compliance with business-aligned functions in a simple and yet most effective manner.

Features

• Load any VI PowerShell script through a dynamically created context menu (often no change needed)
• Use of VM or Host based PowerShell scripts
• Run Scripts against single or multiple chosen objects (also Cluster, DataCenter)
• Switch between Debug and silent mode
• Use local scripts or scripts from network shares
• Enhance the VI Client or VirtualCenter functionality for your demands
• PowerShell scripts using the correct VirtualCenter access rights
• all script activities are logged
• Usage of predefined scripts provided by icomasoft
• Support for PowerGUI powerpack files

How to enable SSH on ESX 3i at 10:00

This one has been around for a while but I thought I would document it on my blog as I just used it and there is a growing demand for 3i help due to it now being free !

How to enable SSH on VMware ESX 3i.

After reading the VMTN forum use the following steps to enable SSH

• From the console press ALT-F1
• Type unsupported and press ENTER
• Enter the root password
• Enter the following command vi /etc/inetd.conf
• Search for the #SSH settings
  
• Remove the # from the SSH row
• Save the config by using :wq!
• Type ps | grep inetd on the console
• Send a hangup signal by using the following command kill -s HUP

You can now use Putty to SSH to your 3i server.

Free Powershell Book at 09:10

Learn Microsoft Windows PowerShell one step at a time with practical,
hands-on instruction from Microsoft's leading scripting trainer, Ed
Wilson.

Work at your own pace and build practical system administration
skills as you learn how to use Windows PowerShell to administer
Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Exchange, and other Microsoft technologies.

You will learn how to write your first Windows PowerShell commands and
scripts to automate setup, deployment, and administration.

Download here

Free VMbook - Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery at 08:32

This Free VMware VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time of test or during an actual event that necessitated the declaration of a disaster, resulting in the activation of services in a designated BCDR site.

Downloadable here