Veeam Backup and FastSCP at 20:37

I was looking for a way to transfer some VM's from a Linux VMware 2.0 server to a VMware ESX 3.5 server as fast as possible to minimise the amount of downtime.

As these files would need to be copied to a windows share first for the converter to import i started with WinSCP, when it told me it was going to take 5 hours I looked elsewhere, I have used the Free Veeam FastSCP program before and new that unfortunately I could not copy files from a Linux server to the local windows machine.

During the previous week I was made aware, courtesy of @VMDoug that there was a new Beta of this product, I downloaded it and installed it and to my surprise look at what I found....

A nice new shiny 'My Computer Node'.

As it turns out, that VM that was going to take 5 hours to transfer was done and dusted in 45 minutes !

Very, Very Impressive, and this is still a beta !

But as Duncan at Yellow Bricks makes clear in his post, this is not necessarily the most secure method of transferring the data, but as I was on the same network and not worried about the security it worked out great !

Go download Veeam Backup and FastSCP from the Veeam site now, every VI admin should have it !

Next London VM User Group announced at 17:46

The next Vmware user group has been announced in London to be held on Tuesday 10th March 2009.

I will be there so please come over and say Hi as I normally know no-one !

The details released are as follows....

The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting (sponsorship pending :-), to be held on Tuesday 10th March 2009. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two.Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444. The nearest tube station is Mansion House, location information is available here.

PLEASE NOTE: As well as the date changing from the previously-published one, the day has also changed to Tuesday, and we're in a different part of the venue from normal (out of the lift, turn right). Rest assured, the usual UG staples of great content and me banging on about Powershell will be present and correct.

Reception is from 1230 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm. Our agenda for is not final at the moment, but looks something like this:

12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:15 Welcome & News
13:20 – 14:05 Sponsor Presentation - TBA
14:10 – 14:55 Presentation on real world Site Recovery Manager experience
15:00 – 15:20 Refreshments Break
15:25 – 16:00 Committee-moderated, user-generated content and discussion (some good stuff being lined up here)
16:05 – 16:45 VMworld Cannes debrief
16:45 – 17:00 Close
17:00 – Pub

Please feel free to contribute to the 'UG content ideas' forum thread running here. We won't be able to incorporate all of the ideas for this coming meeting, but will do our best to include some of them.

To register your interest in attending, please reply with up to two named attendees from your organisation. If you do not receive a confirmation mail from us, please don't just turn up since we will not be able to admit you to the meeting. Content from the meetings will continue to be uploaded to http://public.box.net/londonug, NDA permitting.

Sincerely, and with regards,

The UKLVMUG Steering Committee

New Blog layout at 17:44

OK, I have finally stopped messing with my new blog layout so hopefully everyone will agree it looks better.

Any comments or suggestions please do not hesitate to leave me a comment below.

vDiagram – VMGuru Style at 21:28

Scott Herold (VMGuru) has done it again, he has a habit of taking my scripts and then improving them beyond reality.

I think next time I will be asking him to check it out before I release it on the public.

Firstly he has amended the VMware Twits script and created a really neat PowerGui action which you can import into the VMware PowerGui Power Pack and allows you an easy way to keep up to date with all the VMware related twitters, Check it out here

As if that wasn't enough he has now made some AMAZING improvements to the vDiagram script showing off his new shapes and also advising of new plans for it within PowerGui, how amazing would that be to be able to right click on a cluster and say ‘vDiagram it’ or to be able to right click a PortGroup and draw all VM’s attached to it and its relations with vSwitches.

The new shapes are absolutely gorgeous, make sure you check out the VMGuru site to keep updated on some of the great things he has planned with the VI Toolkit and general VMware related updates.

Check his article out here

Thanks Scott (And no I am not French :))

vDiagram - Draw your VI with one script at 20:19

Every good blog post should have some real life story to help you visualise why things happen so here goes:

The Story

One day whilst sat in the office updating the disaster recovery documentation I needed to document the Virtual Infrastructure, we all know that managers like pretty pictures so the first thing they asked for was a pretty diagram of how the infrastructure looked.

After dropping my 40th VM object on the page I started to get a bit bored, i looked at other options.  There is already a great tool on the market that performs this job, Veeam Reporter produces multiple documents and does a great job, but being a contractor I have a nil budget.  Knowing that you can do some very cool things with Powershell I wondered how easy it would be to hook into the Visio com object to get powershell to create the document for me.

As it turns out it wasn't that hard, there were a few sticky moments where I had to refer to the Visio forums, and a great starting point by the only powershell reference using Visio I could find (Check out CommandBreak_ Thanks Joeseph) after explaining what powershell was to the guys in the Visio Forum and explaining why I was using powershell as I think this is the first time these people had heard of it, I started to relate some of there c# examples back into powershell.

The Result

The result is by no means a totally polished all singing all dancing documenter that documents your VI from the left, from the right and upside down but what it is, is an example of what you can do with the Visio COM objects and powershell combined.

I have not yet included all the options I would like, in future versions I would like to be able to document the networking setup / storage paths etc but I'm working on something else so wanted to get this script out into the public.

Instructions

You will need:

• Powershell V1 (I haven't tried it on V2 yet)
  
• The VI Toolkit
• Microsoft Visio (I have only tried 2003 +)

How to use:

1. Download the zip file from the bottom of this page
   
2. Once extracted copy the  'My-VI-Shapes.vss' file to your 'My Documents\My Shapes' folder.  If the folder does not exist create it and copy the file in.
3. Run the powershell script with the following options:

To diagram the entire Infrastructure:

vDiagram.ps1 -VIServer MYVISERVER

To diagram a specific cluster use the following:

vDiagram.ps1 -VIServer MYVISERVER -Cluster "Production Cluster'

Example Output

The Download

VI3 Quick Reference Card at 16:12

The guys over at vmrefernce.com have just updated there VI3 reference card, having used the last version many times and always keeping a copy on my desk I would check out the updated version and print off a few copies for you and your colleagues.

The new version contains all the updated information form ESX 3.5 Update 3 so go grab a copy from here now: http://www.vmreference.com/vi3-card/

Should I virtualise Exchange ? at 19:53

For a long time the answer was no, but developments in the VMware Products have lead to major improvements in disk/network/memory and CPU performance so now the question is...

Where do I start ?

If your looking for a good starting point I would listen to the recent podcast from the VMware community round table which was specifically on virtualising Exchange..

• Exchange, new Security podcast, and more ... Roundtable podcast #31
  

Also you may want to check out the VMware pages written especially for virtualising Exchange, make sure you check out the resources tab....

• http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/exchange/
  

It would seam that after years of advising against it even Microsoft are jumping on the band waggon:

With the release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a virtualized Exchange 2007 SP1 server is no longer restricted to the realm of the lab; it can be deployed in a production environment and receive full support from Microsoft. 

Check out the full article on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog here

Reservations / Limits and Shares at 22:12

Apparently when performing a Virtual Center upgrade from '2.5 Update 1' to 'Update 2' caused some issues when someone on twitter upgraded, It gave some of the attached Virtual machines reservations and limits that did not exist before, this obviously caused a few problems, especially to the machines that had more memory allocated than was limited.

I was asked if there was a way to extract all the Limit/Reservation information from Virtual Center, the following script does just that, into a nice csv file which can be loaded into excel and sorted as needed…..

$Filename = "C:\MyInformation.csv"

Connect-VIServer MYSERVER
$AllVMs = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine |Sort Name
$myCol = @()
Foreach ($VM in $AllVMs){
$MYInfo = "" |select-Object VMName,CPUReservation,CPULimit,CPUShares,MEMSize,MEMReservation,MEMLimit,MEMShares
$MYInfo.VMName = $VM.Name
$MYInfo.CPUReservation = $VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Reservation
If ($VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Limit-eq "-1"){
$MYInfo.CPULimit = "Unlimited"}
Else{
$MYInfo.CPULimit = $VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Limit}
$MYInfo.CPUShares = $VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Shares.Shares
$MYInfo.MEMSize = $VM.Config.Hardware.MemoryMB
$MYInfo.MEMReservation = $VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Reservation

If ($VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Limit-eq "-1"){
$MYInfo.MEMLimit = "Unlimited"}
Else{
$MYInfo.MEMLimit = $VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Limit}
$MYInfo.MEMShares = $VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Shares.Shares
$myCol += $MYInfo
}

$myCol |Export-csv -NoTypeInformation $Filename

Check Cluster Configurations at 12:36

Hugo has been pushing out some nice scripts recently and his latest is a cracker...

This Powershell script generates an overview of any items that are not available to every ESX server in a VMware cluster. These items might prevent your vm’s being vmotioned by DRS or restarted by HA. Pretty serious business, I’d say!

The items involved are:
1. datastores
2. LUNs (important when using Raw Device Mappings)
3. port groups

The output is a nicely formatted HTML page showing not only which items are misconfigured, but also where the are available and where they are absent.

Download it here and check out his site for some more amazing scripts.

vExpert at 21:50

As you will have probably seen from the other vBloggers out there VMware (should that now be vMware) have announced there version of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).

Its called a vExpert and you can have your say as to who you think deserves this prestigious title here

Powershell Workstation/Server Audit script update at 12:09

Following some great comments from Jeffrey Snover and other PowerShell Guru's on the previous version of my Audit script I have now re-written the script to incompas some of the superior wisdom emparted upon me.

So what does this mean ?

• I am now using a string to store all the html code as I build it up through the script as blogged by Jeffrey here
• I am now using $env:computername rather than localhost - Thanks to Jeffrey Hicks, your right it does look better !
• I am breaking from my switch statements correctly (schoolboy error on my part)
• I am now using a terminating error where needed
• I have changed the keyboard map switch statement into a hashtable
• The code is now over 100 lines shorter and now fits into http://poshcode.org (Cool)

The Bad News

Jeffreys parting comment was:

It would be a lot faster as well.

Again - awesome script!
Cheers.
Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

Unfortunatly although I will agree with the awesome script part when I ran some tests to see if the script ran faster, which I was convinced it would, mainly due to only writing the content out at the end rather than one line at a time I had some supprising results:

PS C:\Audit> measure-command {& "C:\Audit\OldAudit.ps1"}

Days : 0
Hours : 0
Minutes : 0
Seconds : 14
Milliseconds : 57
Ticks : 140570477
TotalDays : 0.000162697311342593
TotalHours : 0.00390473547222222
TotalMinutes : 0.234284128333333
TotalSeconds : 14.0570477
TotalMilliseconds : 14057.0477


PS C:\Audit> measure-command {& "C:\Audit\Audit.ps1"}

Days : 0
Hours : 0
Minutes : 0
Seconds : 18
Milliseconds : 480
Ticks : 184803922
TotalDays : 0.000213893428240741
TotalHours : 0.00513344227777778
TotalMinutes : 0.308006536666667
TotalSeconds : 18.4803922
TotalMilliseconds : 18480.3922

Can anyone shed any light on this as frankly I'm baffled ?!

Thanks again for all the comments on the script and the new version is below:



A sample of the output can be viewed here (best viewed in Internet Explorer):

Windows 7 Public Beta at 12:27

On January 9th, the Windows 7 Beta will be available for Windows enthusiasts to download via the Windows 7 page on Windows.com. The Windows 7 Beta is going to be available download-only (Microsoft are not sending out physical media) and available for a limited time to the first 2.5 million people who download the beta.

For an easy way to test this out follow this well written post over at 'VM /ETC' which will show you a step by step guide on installing Windows 7 in VMware Workstation

For more information check out the Windows Team Blog

Vizioncore Leads the Way with Full Support for VMware’s ESXi at 16:26

I have just recieved an email notification from Vizioncore about a new product:

Vizioncore Inc., today announced that vRanger Pro 3.2.8, the latest version of its recognized industry-standard backup and restore solution, will be the first and only product on the market today to provide full support for VMware ESXi 3.5.

VMware ESXi 3.5 provides a thin hypervisor compared to the full ESX version, and has been designed to provide a smaller footprint to both simplify adoption of virtualization as well as increase security of the platform. Both free and licensed versions of VMware ESXi exist, and vRanger Pro 3.2.8 will provide backup and restore currently for only licensed versions typically found in large organizations.

“While other solutions do exist on the market, they are only able to provide backup and cannot properly restore. These products do not incorporate a method to support ESXi without the console capability that existed in ESX,” explains Chris Akerberg, President and Chief Operating Officer of Vizioncore Inc. “vRanger Pro is the only product available today that both backs up and restores virtual machine images running on VMware ESXi hosted servers without the need for scripting.”

VMware has been shipping a free version of ESXi, however the free version has limited functionality. While the free version makes it easy for customers to adopt virtualization, they will need to move to licensed versions of ESXi to allow them to take advantage of additional functionality provided by VMware such as VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), Update Manager, HA and VMotion. Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro 3.2.8 can leverage the VCB framework to perform full backup as well as offering significant value-add features such as differential backups and compression of ESXi.

Another important feature offered by vRanger Pro 3.2.8 allows users to take advantage of remote data access that VMware has provided for a clean and simplified restore process. “Customers are looking to adopt ESXi because it is an embedded install which is far more secure and reliable for the user,” continues Akerberg. “At Vizioncore, as we rapidly respond to new developments in the virtualization market, we demonstrate, yet again, that Vizioncore leads the way when it comes to providing support for VMware’s latest technology.”

For more information please visit www.vizioncore.com.

Virtual Twits at 20:41

This list and script has now been moved to the new blog, please check here for the latest version:

http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/01/06/virtual-twits/

Removing SCVMM from vCenter at 08:29

An interesting article was bought to my attention which explains that if you ever use SCVMM to control your VMware environment (no comment) and then decide to remove it again (again no comment) there are a few things left behind.

The following blog explains what is left behind and whats better it even gives you a nice powershell script to remove the leftovers, good job !

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 makes several changes to your vCenter environment that you may like to know about, especially since they don’t seem to be mentioned in the product documentation. It’s also worth pointing out that none of these changes are reverted when you subsequently decide to discontinue managing vCenter with SCVMM.

Read the rest of the article here