Virtu-Al

This site has moved

2009-03-01T15:21:00.001Z

I have now moved all content to a new blog address which is easier to remember and also this will enable me to add more features in the future.

Please keep following me:

Blog: http://www.virtu-al.net/

RSS: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Virtu-Al

The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative

2009-02-23T15:09:00.005Z

Using powershell to manage applications is no new thing, Microsoft are pushing things that way with the release of Exchange 2007 where everything in the GUI is pushed back down to the powershell console and completed there.

So, Imagine if you could do that with VMware products, how amazing would that be !

Building on the success of PowerGui it looks like dreams may come true soon as VMGuru and team have been working on a new product which will take the power of the already successful PowerGUI and enhance this to bring even more powershell goodness to the virtual arena.

VMGuru talks about this over on his blog check it out here...

" I can now officially announce that I am branching the PowerGUI code base (Hey, why start from scratch when I've got something phenomenal already) and will be giving the dedicated attention to virtualization management using PowerShell and the VMware Toolkit for Windows (VITK). To read more about my open community initiative to drive this technology and learn more about the project, make sure you visit my new website http://www.thevesi.org. The best part of all, it's complete free of charge. No limits on environment size, no ripping away almost all of the real functionality after 30 days, it's simply...Free. "

VI Toolkit Quick Reference Guide

2009-02-23T14:34:00.004Z

I'm currently sat in Heathrow Airport Terminal 1, I have just found a nice Zurich stand where they give you place to sit, a plug for the laptop and even an Ethernet cable with free Internet access, how nice is that !

So I thought I would best use my time to upload a Quick Reference guide to the VI Toolkit, hopefully I will be handing a few of these out at VMWorld but thought I would also add it to my blog for those of you who were unable to make it.

If you are interested in getting started with the VI Toolkit then print off the attached pdf file on a duplex printer, fold it in half and you have the ultimate getting started guide.

Thanks to C.Shanklin, S.Herold, L.Dekens and C.Bunch for their help with the editing and for the one-liners.

Have Fun !

More Network Info

2009-02-13T23:54:00.004Z

Following my previous network information script I was asked to add the VSwitch, so here it is...

The following script will add some nice host network information into an object which is exported to a csv file for passing to the network guys or can be used to find your server in that mess of cables that are always meaning to be tidied in the data center.

You will get:

Host
VSwitch
VSwitch Ports (Added for @gabvirtualworld)
VSwitch Ports in use (Added for @gabvirtualworld)
Physical Nic Name
Speed
MAC
Switch Device ID
Port ID
Observed Network ranges
VLAN's

Missing anything ?!

Sample output:

PowerGUI - Get started the easy way

2009-02-13T23:16:00.003Z

Are you using PowerGUI and the VMware Powerpack yet, if the answer is no then why not ?

If you think its something that you will have to learn and you just dont have the time then please stop making excuses right now because VMGuru has just released some great new videos that not only show you how to get started but will also convert you into a guru.

The following videos are available from VMGuru's site here

Establishing Connections to your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
Navigate your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
Execute Links and Actions in the PowerGUI Console
Create and Save Filters using the PowerGUI Console
Using the PowerGUI Script Editor

vCenter Converter 4.0 - Out Now

2009-02-13T22:47:00.002Z

Ive been using the beta for a while now and have to say, its amazing, if you have used the previous versions of VMware Converter then make sure you download the new version from http://www.vmware.com/download/converter/

Now you can convert physical machines running Windows and Linux operating systems to

VMware virtual machines quickly, reliably and without any disruption.

Simplify integration by converting third-party formats such as Parallels Desktop, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, Norton Ghost, Acronis, StorageCraft and Microsoft Virtual Server/ Virtual PC to VMware virtual machines.

Eliminate source server downtime and reboot with non disruptive conversions through hot cloning.

For free you can't go wrong. Download it now if you have any P2V's planned.

VMworld Europe - Come say Hi

2009-02-11T20:33:00.003Z

I have now had confirmation that I will be able to attend VMworld Europe, both from VMware and the wife, I wont tell you which one was harder to get.

If you will be attending make sure you come and say Hi, I am willing to talk about the VI Toolkit and powershell in general, if your looking to get started I can even take you a few of the tips and tricks to get you in and scripting.

If you are wondering where to find me amongst all the of the French people I will be hanging around the VMTN session hoping that some of there expert skills will rub off on me, so come and see me in the community lounge at the following times:

Tuesday 24th – 13.00 – 14.00
Wednesday 25th – 13.00 – 14.00

You will be able to meet the following people and pick there brains on any of the Virtualisation topics you can think of.

The following experts will be there to answer your questions...

Duncan Epping, - http://www.yellow-bricks.com/
Gabrie van Zanten, - http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/ ( I think he is swedish)
Jason Boche, - VMTNModerator and http://www.boche.net/blog/
Steve Beaver, - Tripwire andVMTN Moderator and Published Author
Scott Herold, - http://www.vmguru.com/ ( I think he is Canadian)
Thomas Bryant, - VizionCore, and VMTN Moderator
Wil van Antwerpen, - http://www.vi-toolkit.com
Eric Sloof, -http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/ (He will probably have a video camera in his hand)
Tom Howarth - http://planetvm.net/ (The loud guy on the VMwarecommunities podcast)
Alan Renouf, - Not French

So please come and say hello.

P.S. Payback time !

Virtualisation City

2009-02-05T14:32:00.000Z

Ok, I dont normally post stuff like this but this is too funny....

VMware Infrastructure PowerPack 2.1 for PowerGUI

2009-02-02T20:38:00.002Z

Do you want to get some of the benefits of the VI Toolkit without the learning curve (even though its very easy to pickup) ?

Well Kirk (Poshoholic) Munro has just updated the VMware Infrastructure PowerPack. This is a great GUI way to access the power of the VI Toolkit and the skills of a Powershell Expert rolled into one smooth, easy to use application.

The VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack for PowerGUI has just been updated to version 2.1 adding lots of new features and improving the already brilliant features. This PowerPack facilitates management and automation of VMware Infrastructure servers using the VMware VI Toolkit with PowerGUI’s expandable administrative console.

Version 2.1 of the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack includes the following highlights:

Significant performance improvements when loading datacenters and clusters.
New top-level container nodes to facilitate viewing objects without having to browse into the Managed Hosts node.
Links allowing you to browse into log files from hosts.
Support for the VMware VI Toolkit 1.5 release.
VMotion support for virtual machines.

In addition to these changes, several links have been added and quite a few defects have been fixed.

You can learn more about this PowerPack, including version history and other details here.

Great job Kirk and team.

Provison ESX Hosts through Powershell

2009-02-01T10:36:00.007Z

The VI Toolkit community has been getting busier and busier of late, I think even LucD is taking 5 minutes to respond rather than his normal 2 minute answers !

There is one area of the VI Toolkit communities that I feel does not get enough publicity, there have been many scripts written by the community and members of VMware that are stored in the documents area of the community.

I will make it my aim to try and bring some of these fantastic scripts out into the open as the scripts and the people who wrote these scripts have done some amazing coding to help everyone else.

For example: NAEPS (Not Another ESX Provisioning Script) by SCampbell

This is one of a few scripts that he has written, I'm sure I will go over the others in due course. If nothing it gives a great insight into what can be done with the VI Toolkit.

This script can be used to configure the ESX servers being deployed, it includes some wonderful settings:

Configure the license server
Upload signed SSL key and certificate files to the ESX server
Rename all local datastores to try to reduce the accidental deployment to local stores
Configure the firewall for NTP and updateManager
Targeted for ESX although there is also a nod to ESXi provisioning
Configure the environment for our special case where the VCS-ESX communications are on an isolated network
Reset the root password
Configure networks
Joining to VCS servers
Configuring NTP, DNS, domain, name, IP's etc.
And a separate isolated VMotion network
Rescan the HBAs
Some interesting concepts explored here, although hints of topics on these throughout the forums
Upload files to an https server with a self-signed SSL certificate
Finding the local datastores on an ESX server
Accessing and modifying the firewall configuration
Dealing with Passwords entered with the Read-Host -asSecureString

Some of his caveats:
This is my first significant Powershell, .Net and VI project. I am sure many of you will cringe when you look at the arcane methods I found.
We do a manual install of ESX rather than using kickstart. I expect we'll head towards ESXi and this work wouldn't have paid back. This script is run immediately after the reboot following the installation.
It works pretty well in our target environment, but there is no guarantee or warranty it will work in yours.
The upload stuff works here works for fairly small files. (file size=memory consumed) Carter Shanklin and I are working to improve the upload process. Watch Carter's (c_shanklin) blog and his VI Toolkit Extensions at http://www.codeplex.com/vitoolkitextensions
A few features for the next version of this script - perhaps in another life:
It should really attach the server to an Update Manager baseline and remediate.
Replace all the anachronisms with the best-practice methods
Configure a VMKernel network and gateway on the Management VLAN
A way cool Windows.Forms with drop-down lists to capture the information
Automatically download backup ESXi configuration file to the local disk
Logging:
As you may have noticed all the messages in this script are simply dumped to the console, rather than explicitly output with Write-Host. You can redirect this to a log file and still see the console messages by invoking the script as follows:
.\configureESX.ps1 | Tee-Object .\configureESX-server.log

So if that doesn't wet your appetite for the great scripts on the site stay tuned for my next post where I will add another script, this set of posts is mainly to fill time while I write my next reporting script which is already looking quite cool and I'm really enjoying writing.

Download the script and read more here: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8170

Veeam Backup and FastSCP

2009-01-30T20:37:00.007Z

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

2009-01-30T17:46:00.004Z

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

2009-01-30T17:44:00.002Z

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

2009-01-29T21:28:00.001Z

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

2009-01-26T20:19:00.007Z

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:

Download the zip file from the bottom of this page
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.
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

2009-01-25T16:12:00.002Z

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 ?

2009-01-23T19:53:00.004Z

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

2009-01-20T22:12:00.004Z

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

2009-01-19T12:36:00.002Z

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

2009-01-14T21:50:00.003Z

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

2009-01-09T12:09:00.006Z

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

2009-01-08T12:27:00.002Z

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

2009-01-07T16:26:00.001Z

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

2009-01-06T20:41:00.023Z

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

2009-01-06T08:29:00.001Z

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

List VM's with RDM

2008-12-23T08:56:00.003Z

I was asked if it was possible to list all VM's with Raw Disk Mappings on twitter, a quick search of the VI Toolkit community showed that LucD had already achieved this, I have copied the code below for reference:

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER
$report = @()
$vms = Get-VM | Get-View
foreach($vm in $vms){
 foreach($dev in $vm.Config.Hardware.Device){
   if(($dev.gettype()).Name -eq "VirtualDisk"){
     if($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq "physicalMode"){
       $row = "" | select VMName, HDDeviceName, HDFileName
         $row.VMName = $vm.Name
       $row.HDDeviceName = $dev.Backing.DeviceName
       $row.HDFileName = $dev.Backing.FileName
       $report += $row
     }
   }
 }
}
$report

Powershell V2 CTP3

2008-12-23T08:37:00.003Z

They said it would be December and Microsoft actually kept a deadline... Only Just !

Powershell V2 CTP3 was released last night after several hints from @jsnover on twitter.

To download the latest Community Technology Preview here

Selected New and Updated Features in Windows PowerShell V2 CTP3

PowerShell Remoting

Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)

63 New Cmdlets

Modules

Script Debugging

Advanced Functions

PowerShell Class API

Veeam Monitor 3.0 Free Edition

2008-12-22T11:44:00.003Z

The guys over at Veeam have released an early Christmas present for us all and its a cracker (sorry).

Head over to the Veeam site now to get your free copy of Veeam Monitor 3.0. Very useful for monitoring ESX3i

The Veeam Monitor Free Edition is an easy-to-use VMware monitoring solution designed to meet the day-to-day needs of VMware administrators who need real-time performance monitoring and alerting. Built from the ground up specifically for the virtual world, Veeam Monitor provides a bird’s-eye view of key performance metrics across your virtual ESXi infrastructure.

With Veeam Monitor, you can view real-time resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object or collection of objects, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen. This allows you to finally see your virtual infrastructure as a unified entity, not just a collection of isolated hosts and guests.

Veeam Monitor provides comprehensive data on resource consumption and workload, from VirtualCenter, or ESX and ESXi hosts all the way down to the individual virtual machine level. Detailed real-time statistics are provided for key parameters critical to the health of the virtual environment, such as CPU and memory usage, disk and network I/O, and swap usage. Real-time data for multiple VI objects can be viewed in a convenient consolidated view for each ESX host, resource pool or cluster. This speeds up analysis and troubleshooting, and helps you identify potential resource bottlenecks faster than is possible using the Virtual Infrastructure Client.
Correlation of event and performance data

Veeam Monitor helps you understand how virtual infrastructure activities affect your VM performance, and solve resource usage mysteries with real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as VMotion, snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graphs.
User interface optimized for monitoring

The Veeam Monitor user interface was designed and optimized specifically for monitoring tasks. You can switch easily between different views to quickly find the VMware Infrastructure component you are looking for, or you can perform an integrated search. Drill down to an individual VM and find out how much CPU and memory it is consuming, and even connect to the VM console – all right from the Monitor user interface. Find out at a glance which components of your VMware infrastructure are the largest resource consumers: the Tops section of Veeam Monitor helps you identify which virtual machines are consuming the most CPU, memory, disk I/O and network resources.
Advanced alerting and flexible alarms
Veeam Monitor provides comprehensive alerting with custom alarms that can be based on many sources. You can easily set up e-mail notifications or SNMP traps for important events such as a given number of running VMs is exceeded, VM heartbeat is lost, a specific event is generated by VirtualCenter etc. Being alerted on such events allows for faster administrator response to critical issues, helping you to maintain better health and uptime of your virtual infrastructure. The Free Edition allows you to set and use up to ten alarms.
Scalable architecture
Veeam Monitor is an enterprise-level client-server application that enables multi-admin access to performance data without affecting ESX server and VirtualCenter performance or changing your access policies. It gathers all performance information into a local or remote SQL database, allowing users to access infrastructure-wide performance data and reporting as needed. While you are using the Free Edition, this data is still gathered, so that if you later choose to upgrade to the full Veeam Monitor, you will have access to this historical data for capacity planning, chargeback and trend analysis.
Support for multiple VirtualCenters
Veeam Monitor can be optionally integrated with VMware VirtualCenter to provide cluster-aware monitoring of your virtual machines. Veeam Monitor supports and extends VMware’s management framework, offloading the monitoring burden from VirtualCenter for enhanced VC performance. And with support for consolidating performance data from multiple VirtualCenters, Veeam Monitor shows performance data from your entire virtual infrastructure on a single screen – no matter how large your VMware deployment is.
Easy to deploy and use
While providing you truly enterprise-scale architecture, Veeam Monitor has extremely low system requirements comparing to other VMware monitoring solutions. Veeam Monitor takes minutes to deploy and use in any size environment. Installation package contains everything you need to start using the software right away, minutes after you download it!
Simple upgrade to the full version

New VMWare Powerpack for PowerGui

2008-12-19T22:25:00.003Z

WOW!

Kirk Munro has really done a job on the VMWare Power pack for PowerGui, if your new to powershell or even if your not, download it now, this will really change the way you work and allow you to get more information out of your Virtual Infrastructure.

Subscribe to updates to the PowerPack Library if you want to be notified whenever a PowerPack is published or updated (includes documentation updates), or watch the Poshoholic blog for news.

Supported features:

Management of multiple VMware Virtual Center, ESX, ESXi and VMware Server hosts when using the VMware VI Toolkit 1.0 release
Management of multiple VMware Virtual Center, ESX and ESXi hosts when using the VMware VI Toolkit 1.5 release
Single sign-on to multiple hosts using the same credentials
Ability to browse through inventory hierarchies on Virtual Center
Ability to view topological data for any managed server
Management of datacenters, clusters, resource pools, hosts, folders, virtual machines, templates, snapshots, networks, datastores, files, tasks and log files

Latest Version:

December 19, 2008 (2.0.0)

- reorganized the PowerPack structure to facilitate easier management of multiple hosts and to allow users to retrieve objects from one or more of the hosts they are managing whether they are already connected or not
- added support for browsing the VMware Inventory hierarchy (includes Hosts and Clusters, Virtual Machines and Templates, Networks and Datastores), including being able to browse directly into the file system on the datastores
- added many new links and actions
- exposed many more VMware Infrastructure objects through topological views and through integration in the hierarchy
- improved the performance of many nodes, links and actions
- added single sign-on support (note that connecting to multiple hosts using the same username but different passwords is currently not supported, but we are working on that and will provide support for this soon)
- tested management against Virtual Center 2.0, ESX 3.0x and 3.5, ESXi 3.5 and Virtual Server 2.0 (note: management of Virtual Center 2.0 requires version 1.0 of the VMware VI Toolkit)
- and more!

Extra fields in the VI Client

2008-12-17T09:01:00.003Z

How would you like extra fields in the VI Client, maybe a field for if the VM has a snapshot or even the host hardware model or ESX version. Well now you can.

Hugo Peters has been creating some amazing scripts which put data back into the VI Client for you to use, check out his posts:

Add Snapshot Information to the VI Client using Powershell

Add Custom Fields to VI Client with Powershell (Samples)

Great work Hugo.

PrimalForms Example (Virtual Center Log)

2008-12-15T21:15:00.003Z

Fatbeard (don't ask as I don't know) has been reading my blog, he saw the VI Toolkit script I produced for getting events out of the virtual center database and has put a nice GUI on top of the whole thing to create a really nice usable app.

If you haven't seen PrimalForms yet and are using powershell I suggest you check it out, it basically creates all the code you need to create a GUI for your powershell scripts.

Check out his great example here

Top 10 PowerShell Scripts

2008-12-12T23:25:00.001Z

Eric Siebert has published his list of the Top 10 PowerShell scripts that VMware administrators should use there are some good ones on here that are worth checking out, can’t believe I made number 2 ! Thanks Eric.

Report into MS Word

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-7070

A script from Alan Renouf that provides a report in Microsoft Word of the virtual machines in your environment with graphs and pie charts.

Microsoft NLB Error when trying to Cluster Cloned VM’s

2008-12-12T22:56:00.001Z

After configuring a few NLB VM’s recently on VMware I was intrigued when one of the people I follow on twitter was having issues with cloned NLB’s, SimonLong_ kindly agreed to document the details so I could blog about it and share his experience……

My Job; Cluster 2 VM’s using Microsoft NLB, a simple 2 minute job right? Wrong!

Why? Because my 2^nd VM was a clone of the 1^st.

Once I had my newly created VM’s configured I proceeded to fire up the NLB Manager tool and began to create my new cluster. Cluster configured…first VM added to the cluster, no problems.

Then I tried to add the 2^nd VM… I was confronted with this Error:

“No interfaces are available for installing a new cluster”

Great there goes my lunch break!

After a little Googling I come across this MS Support article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828258

Because I had cloned the 2^nd VM this meant that the Network Adapters on both VM’s had identical GUID’s in the registry and apparently NLB isn’t a fan of matching GUID’s.

There are two ways I found to fix this;

The Lazy way (which I first used)
My Recommend solution found here (which I now use, when I realised that I was being a Cowboy).

Solution 1

Add a second NIC to either VM that your trying to cluster
Remove the configuration and Disable the primary NIC
Configure the second NIC

You should now be able to add both VM’s to the NLB Cluster.

Solution 2

On either VM enter “Device Manager”
Expand “Network Adapters” and right mouse click on the Network adapter that you are trying to add to the NLB configuration.
Select ‘Uninstall’. NIC has now been uninstalled.
Next you want to re-add the network card which in turn will create a new GUID for it. Do this by right mouse clicking your servers name at the top of the ‘Device Manager’ list and select ‘Scan for hardware changes’. This will now re-detect the NIC and give it a new GUID.
Now exit out of “Device Manager”
Re-configure the NIC

You should now be able to add both VM’s to the NLB Cluster.

Now that I was able to add the VM into the cluster I did receive the following errors;

· Could not read configuration of interface "{DF52417D-E337-4543-A223-8D17514E02BC}": error 0x800706ba

· Update 2 failed with error 0x800706ba

Ignore it the VM still seems to converge fine into the cluster.

Detailed VMware Host Network Information

2008-12-12T15:31:00.005Z

Following my previous script 'Extracting Cisco Discovery Protocol Info' I decided to tidy up the script, give a more controlled output and add a few items to the output.

The following script will add some nice host network information into an object which is exported to a csv file for passing to the network guys or can be used to find your server in that mess of cables that are always meaning to be tidied in the data center.

You will get:

Host,
Physical Nic Name
Speed
MAC
Switch Device ID
Port ID
Observed Network ranges
VLAN's

Who deleted my VM ?

2008-12-10T15:04:00.002Z

Today I had a colleague come to me and say someone had deleted his VM, he didn't know when and thinks it may have been a couple of months ago, he didn't know which host or which datastore it was in. could I tell him when and who. Hmmmm, time to start trawling through the logs I thought.

A quick Twit from @stahler told me that this would be in the Virtual Center Database so, here is a quick powershell which I used to find the culprit...

# Fill in the following information:
$SqlServer = "MYDBSERVER";
$SqlDB = "VMwareDataBase";
$MYVM = "TESTSERVER1"
$TypeofEvent = "vim.event.VmRemovedEvent"
# The vim.event.VmRemovedEvent is a Removed action from VC you can also use :
# vim.event.VmGuestShutdownEvent
# vim.event.VmPoweredOffEvent
# vim.event.VmConnectedEvent

Function Read-VIDB ($SqlQuery)
{
  # Setup SQL Connection
    $SqlConnection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
  $SqlConnection.ConnectionString = "Server = $SqlServer; Database = $SqlDB; Integrated Security = True"

  # Setup SQL Command
    $SqlCmd = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand
  $SqlCmd.CommandText = $SqlQuery
  $SqlCmd.Connection = $SqlConnection

  # Setup .NET SQLAdapter to execute and fill .NET Dataset
    $SqlAdapter = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataAdapter
  $SqlAdapter.SelectCommand = $SqlCmd
  $DataSet = New-Object System.Data.DataSet

  #Execute and Get Row Count
    $nRecs = $SqlAdapter.Fill($DataSet)

  if ($nRecs -gt 0)
  {
      # Do Stuff
        $dataSet.Tables | Select-Object -Expand Rows
  }
}

$SqlQuery = "SELECT CREATE_TIME, USERNAME, VM_NAME, HOST_NAME, EVENT_TYPE FROM VMWareDS.VPX_EVENT WHERE (VM_NAME = N'$MYVM') AND (EVENT_TYPE = '$TypeofEvent')"
$MyResults = Read-VIDB $SqlQuery
$MyResults

Getting Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express to index PowerShell script (.PS1) files

2008-12-09T21:39:00.005Z

A guest blog apperance by Nigel Boulton

As a scripter of more years than I care to think about, I've lost count of the number of times that either somebody has asked me how to do something specific in a particular scripting language, or I need to remember for a new script that I'm writing.

In most cases, I know I've done it before, but I never seem to be able to remember in which script I did it! For this reason, I thought it would be useful to build a fully searchable script repository that I could access from wherever I happened to be at the time.

I did this using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. I'm not going to go into details here of how to do this, as it's fairly straightforward stuff - basically a standard install of these products, with separate document libraries to hold the scripts and programs I've written in the past in various languages.

The document libraries are held in a SharePoint site and indexed by Search Server. Instead, this post is about the part that I struggled with - and didn't manage to find a working solution for online - namely how to get Search Server to correctly index PowerShell script files.

My crawl logs were reporting the following warning for every .ps1 file I'd uploaded to the document library: ‘Crawled (The filtering process could not process this item. This might be because you do not have the latest file filter for this type of item. Install the corresponding filter and retry your crawl.)’, and naturally, no search results were being returned for text in .ps1 files.

I struggled to find a way round this for a while, until Alan and Hal kindly put my dilemma out to the community. Oisin experimented and determined how to do it on his MOSS 2007 system, and although his settings didn't work directly on my system (most likely because of the differences between the products), they set me on the right track to working out some that did (thanks again Oisin). So this blog post is in the hope that someone else in the community might benefit from this experience. Here are the necessary steps:

In Search Server Admin, go to File types - New File Type and add "ps1" (no leading dot)
In Regedit, create a new key called ".ps1" under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension and set it’s (Default) value to {4A3DD7AB-0A6B-43B0-8A90-0D8B0CC36AAB} (the GUID is the same as the one for the .txt extension in same parent key)
Run net stop osearch
Run net start osearch
Start a full crawl on the Content Source
Check the Crawl log

The above procedure can be applied for other file types that Search Server doesn't index by default (and are essentially plain text files that the text filter can understand), although bear in mind that certain file types are blocked by default and it will be necessary to go into Central Admin - Operations (under Security Configuration) - Blocked file types, and then remove the desired file type from the list.

Once this was working, I thought it would be nice to add the finishing touch by giving my PowerShell scripts the proper icon within SharePoint, instead of the boring default blank white document. A bit of online research turned up a procedure for adding indexing of .pdf files, which I adapted to provide an icon for .ps1 files (this is based on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837849). To do this:

Download and save a 17x17 PowerShell script icon gif file (I didn’t have one to hand but Google Image Search did the trick nicely), and save it as:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Images\icps1.gif
Edit the "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Xml\DocIcon.xml" file and insert the following line in the <ByExtension> section, in the appropriate place alphabetically for PS1.

<Mapping Key="ps1" Value="icps1.gif" OpenControl=""/>
Run iisreset /noforce

One final tip – the versioning feature of SharePoint is very useful for maintaining a history of changes made to scripts, but only the current version (and it’s version notes) are indexed, so if I find myself needing to remove any code that I would still like to be able to search for in future, I tend to save the existing script out, then upload it with a different (but descriptive) file name, before replacing the version stored in SharePoint with the modified script.

Extracting Cisco Discovery Protocol Info

2008-12-09T09:39:00.003Z

Inspired by Gabe over at GabesVirtual World (Check out his site he has some great posts) I have added the Cisco Discovery Protocol info, its not the nicest looking output but the info is there !

Extracts all info for each ESX host into a text file, don't forget to change the VI server you are connecting to and the path on lines 1 and 2 of the following script:

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER
$filename = "c:\VirtualNetworkConfig.txt"
$vmhosts = Get-VMHost | Where-Object {$_.State -eq "Connected"} | Get-View
Write-output (Get-Date) | out-file -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts)
{
  $networkSystem = Get-view $vmhost.ConfigManager.NetworkSystem
  Write-output $vmhost.Name | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
  foreach($netSys in $networkSystem)
  {
      foreach($pnic in $netSys.NetworkConfig.Pnic)
      {
          $subnets = $netSys.QueryNetworkHint($pnic.Device)
          foreach($pnicHint in $subnets)
          {
              Write-Output $pnicHint.Device | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
              foreach($pnicIpHint in $pnicHint.Subnet)
              {
                  $info = $hint.connectedSwitchPort | Select *
                  $moreinfo = $hint.connectedSwitchPort.deviceCapability
                  Write-Output $info | Select * | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
                  Write-Output $moreinfo | Select * | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
                  Write-Output "Observed IPRanges: " $pnicIpHint.IpSubnet | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
              }
          }
      }
  }
}

Managing VMWare Infrastructure with PowerShell

2008-12-08T21:19:00.006Z

So you have used VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3, you know how powerful it is and how great the features are within the VI client but what happens when you want to get more details or you want to automate some features… You wait for the next version and hope they have included them in there – WRONG !

You wait till early next year and you buy "Managing VMWare Infrastructure with PowerShell" written by Hal Rottenberg and published by SAPIEN Press.

I have just finished technically reviewing this great book, if you haven't bothered learning PowerShell yet (why not) and you haven't looked at the VI Toolkit then please do yourself a favour and buy this book when it is released.

Not only does it give you an amazing insight into the way things work below the GUI it also teaches you the basics of PowerShell and how to use this technology to manage the VMware feature set we have come to know and love.

Hal's unique writing style will take you through learning how to perform many extensive tasks which would normally take hours, sometimes days through the client and show you how to perform these actions within minutes or sometimes seconds. He even adds a little of his own sense of humour to lighten some of the more mundane tasks.

Learn how to deploy multiple virtual machines in minutes, report on the extensive areas of virtual infrastructure and much much more.

Believe me, this is one book I would recommend for any VI Admin to read and store net to your management workstation.

If you are a VI admin reading this then stop doing things the long way and get a bit of Posh in your life.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Why You Need This Book

Windows PowerShell Crash Course
Getting Started
Scripting with Virtual Infrastructure
Understanding Your Verbs and Nouns
Basic Cmdlets
Deploying Your Virtual Infrastructure
Configuring Your Environment
Reporting and Discovery
Keeping Things Running (Maintenance)
When Things Break (Troubleshooting)
Management and Automation Case Studies

Appendices

Other Resources

Observed IP Ranges

2008-12-08T14:26:00.003Z

Recently I needed to check a whole bunch of servers to see if we had a particular VLAN tagged on any of the ESX Hosts, after a quick post on the VI Toolkit forum and a little messing, the following script tells me quickly which observed IP ranges are on each of the nics in each of the hosts...

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER
$vmhosts = Get-VMHost | Get-View
foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts)
{
   $networkSystem = Get-view $vmhost.ConfigManager.NetworkSystem
   Write-Host $vmhost.Name -foregroundcolor yellow
   foreach($netSys in $networkSystem)
   {
       foreach($pnic in $netSys.NetworkConfig.Pnic)
       {
           $subnets = $netSys.QueryNetworkHint($pnic.Device)
           foreach($pnicHint in $subnets)
           {
               Write-Host $pnicHint.Device
               foreach($pnicIpHint in $pnicHint.Subnet)
               {
                   Write-Host "`t" $pnicIpHint.IpSubnet
               }
           }
       }
   }
}

Get-Scripting now !

2008-12-04T11:22:00.002Z

If you still want to learn powershell but haven't got around to buying a book yet, why not win one....

In Episode 5 of the Get-Scripting Podcast we announced details of a competition to fill in some of the speech bubbles above the heads of community members from the Teched Powershell Panel Discussion photo.

Those nice people at Quest have given us a print copy of Jeffrey Hicks' recent book 'Managing Active Directory With Windows Powershell' to give away as a prize, this is a great book for learning how to utilise Powershell with AD and also a great way to get started in Powershell - they are also going to get Jeffrey to sign it too.

If you'd like to be in with a chance of winning simply send us some suggestions for what some of the panel members below might be thinking and the one we think is the best will get the book. We've got a few other freebies left over from Teched in the Get-Scripting prize cupboard so there should be a runners up prize too.

Send your entries to:

get [dash] scripting [at] hotmail [dot] co [dot] uk

We'll announce the winner in Episode 6 of the podcast which should be recorded mid-December.

Citrix on VMware, 1vCPU or 2vCPU ?

2008-11-29T22:15:00.001Z

Following my previous Citrix testing on VMware I thought it best to try a dual vCPU VM to see if I can get double the users of a single vCPU, sounds logically sensible to me !

So just a reminder that a single vCPU with 25 users ran at around 73% average, a nice figure to run at giving plenty of CPU for peaks and troughs.

This test of a dual vCPU was undertaken following the sucesfull test of 25 users on one VM with 1 x vCPU this was run as a baseline to see how it relates to the single vCPU VM.

Virtual Machine Specification

2 x vCPU (Using VMware process affinity to tie the VM to a specific CPU core)
3072 GB RAM (reduced from 4GB as memory was not being used)

1 x 20GB Hard Disk Stored on SAN

1 x vNic (1GB)

Users Logged on: 50

Logged 10 users on and working over 5 minutes
Logged another 10 users on and working over 5 minutes
Logged another 5 users on and working over 3 minutes
Kept 25 users logged on and working for 15 minutes
Logged all 25 users off over a 5 minute period

As you can see from the above, a 3000Mhz server runs at around 60% which is not a good start bearing in mind the single vCPU VM.

Next Test 50 Users and Dual vCPU

This test was undertaken following the sucesfull test of 25 users on one server with 1xVCPU allowing for a reasonoble amount of capacity for application usage.

Virtual Machine Specification

2 x vCPU (Using VMware process affinity to tie the VM to a specific CPU core)
3072 GB RAM

1 x 20GB Hard Disk Stored on SAN

1 x vNic (1GB)

Users Logged on: 50

Logged 20 users on and working over 5 minutes
Logged another 20 users on and working over 5 minutes
Logged another 10 users on and working over 3 minutes
Kept 50 users logged on and working for 15 minutes
Logged all 50 users off over a 5 minute period

The peak CPU usage of this graph was reached before 50 users were connected and therefore proves that the best method to get more users per physical server is to scale out rather than increase CPU resources.

This will obviously make sense in some cases where the cost of Operating System, Application software and licenses and management costs may make sense to build a 2 x vCPU and get slightly more users.

Getting VMware Host Physical Nic Speeds

2008-11-28T15:27:00.004Z

I had an issue with one of my hosts this week who's nic had auto-negotiated to the wrong speed, following this I wrote a quick script to check the rest of my hosts.

Good job as there were a fair few nics running at 100MB rather than 1GB causing a few issues.

The following script will list each host and there nics and speeds....

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER

$VMhosts = Get-VMHost | Get-View
Foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts)
{
Write-Output $vmhost.Name
$pnic = 0
Do
{
    $Speed = $VMhost.Config.Network.Pnic[$pnic].LinkSpeed.SpeedMb
    Write "Pnic$pnic $Speed"
    $pnic ++
}
Until ($pnic -eq ($VMhost.Config.Network.Pnic.Length))
}

Unable to format a LUN

2008-11-28T10:40:00.004Z

The SAN team issued a new LUN to my hosts and I was unable to format it as I recieved the following error: "Unable to read partition information" on LUN 180 on vmhba1.

Running fdisk from the service console cleared this up, heres my output :

[root@myhost]# fdisk /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1\:0\:180\:0

Command (m for help): p

Disk /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1:0:180:0 (Sun disk label): 15 heads, 64 sectors, 24686 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 960 * 512 bytes

Device Flag Start End Blocks Id System
/vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1:0:180:0p3 u 0 24686 11849280 5 Whole disk
/vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1:0:180:0p4 u 0 2 960 f Unknown
/vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1:0:180:0p5 u 2 24686 11848320 e Unknown

Command (m for help): o
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 24686.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

After this I was able to use the LUN as normal, really put here for my reference in the future :)

Checking CPU Affinity

2008-11-25T13:45:00.002Z

I needed to double check the CPU Affinity settings I had set on some VM's which I wanted tied to the cores in my host, just to double check I had these correct the following one liner works a treat....

Get-Cluster "My Cluster" | Get-VM | Get-View | foreach {Write-output $_.Name $_.Config.CpuAffinity.AffinitySet}

Is MSCS Supported on a HA/DRS Cluster ?

2008-11-20T11:57:00.005Z

(Straight answer in red at the bottom if you want to miss out the novel)

I needed to install Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) on a couple of virtual machines acting as an Active-Passive cluster, with a rule to separate these VM's onto different hosts within VMware 3.5 U1.

Some may ask why (as I did) when you have the wonders that are HA and Vmotion why would you do this ? the short answer was that it took less time (slightly) for the MSCS cluster to fail over to another virtual machine on a different host in the event of hardware failure than it did for HA to realise there was a failure and move the machine and power it back on and the machine to start up.

And as this was a urgent application the MSCS cluster on top of VMware seemed to be the way to go.

So after reading the fantastic white paper by VMware:

Setup for Microsoft Cluster Service
Update 2 Release for ESX Server 3.5, ESX Server 3i version 3.5, VirtualCenter 2.5

Which can be downloaded here

Unfortunately I hit upon a problem in my planned design, on Page 16 of the above document which summarises the caveats for setting up a MSCS cluster on VMware, one of the bullet points was as follows:

Clustered virtual machines cannot be part of VMware clusters (DRS or HA)

I will not use the exact language here but lets just say I was not best pleased !

On thinking about this and the way that it worked and after adding a post on the VMware communities to confirm what I was thinking (great bunch of guys on there) I came up with the following...

As the MSCS Cluster has a private network which it uses for a heartbeat LAN there may be issues VMotioning the server over to another host, this as we know can cause a slight blip in the network communication and if this was to happen it may cause a problem with the MSCS cluster causing it to issue a failover and suddenly the service would be unavailable.

OK it makes sense, but that is quite a broad statement to make, "Clustered virtual machines cannot be part of VMware clusters (DRS or HA)". Why couldn't I just edit the DRS Cluster and set the Virtual Machines Automation Level to Disabled ? Surely this would stop the machines from being VMotioned and everyone would be happy ?

Whilst in theory this would work forever and a day and I would not get any issues I decided to confirm why the document did not reflect this setup as even if I did get it working it was point blankly "Not Supported" by VMware, and as we know working in a corporate environment this is a big NO NO.

Next Step: I raised a call with VMware to ask why this was the case, after a few games of Ping Pong I received my answer.....

Hi Alan,

You are correct in your assumption. It is not recommended to have MSCS VM's within a Vmware Cluster. This is for the reasons you mentioned above regarding interrupted heartbeats. You could set individual HA/DRS settings on these individual MSCS VM's in order to keep them running on the specific hosts. However, there would be issues in the future if these values were ever changed unknowingly by another administrator with access to the system.

Yes, I can confirm that this would be supported by VMware. However, if DRS ever tried to move these VM's even with the DRS setting disabled then this would be a bug and would need to be investigated.

I would recommend that you test this setup using a network monitoring tool such as IO Meter to ensure that no heartbeats are dropped from the VM.

PowerGui 1.5.3 Released

2008-11-20T09:57:00.002Z

Wahoo, I have been waiting for this one, I have tried a few editors but always go back to PowerGui.

Hopefully this will fix the issue I was having with code over a certain amount of lines and also some sloweness I have been getting expanding variables in debug mode.

A few other little problems too.

If you havent tried it yet, download it for free now....

http://powergui.org/downloads.jspa

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 - Warning

2008-11-19T10:42:00.002Z

If you are thinking about upgrading to Update 3 you may want to wait until 20th November when a patch is released as there is a issue at the moment where some people are encountering virtual machines being rebooted after a vmotion occurs....

Read here for further information

Last Call: UK PowerShell Use Group

2008-11-16T20:25:00.002Z

UK Powershell User Group

Following on from the last great meeting the next UK Powershell User Group has been announced...

The November meeting of the User Group will be on Thursday 20th November

Time
6.30 - 9.30

Location
Memphis Room
Building 3
Microsoft campus
Thames Valley Park
Reading

Agenda

Powershell Introduction: Objects and get-member
PowerGUI SQL Server Reporting Services powerpack
PowerShell in SQL Server 2008
The usual refreshments break will occur

The PowerShell Introduction is a new feature for meetings where they will explain a particular feature of PowerShell that has caused someone a problem or maybe a slightly more difficult concept.

Please visit the following site to confirm your attendance, please do not just turn up as ou will need to be regiestered....

http://richardsiddaway.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!43CFA46A74CF3E96!1872.entry

Correct HAL Installed ?

2008-11-14T13:05:00.000Z

Following an inspiring blog post from Duncan Epping located here it made me think about how I could find the CPU vs HAL information, a 5 minute mess around in the VI Toolkit produced the following script:

connect-viserver MYVISERVER
$myCol = @()
ForEach ($VM in (Get-VM))
{
   $MyDetails = "" | select-Object Name, HAL, NumvCPU
   $MYDetails.Name = $VM.Name
   $Hal = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $VM.Name -Query "SELECT * FROM Win32_PnPEntity where ClassGuid = '{4D36E966-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}'" | Select Name
   $MYDetails.HAL = $Hal.Name
   $MYDetails.NumvCPU = $VM.NumCPU
   $myCol += $MYDetails
}
$myCol

This will give you a list of your VM's the HAL installed and the number of vCPU's

RSS VI Events - Posh RSS Feed

2008-11-12T08:27:00.000Z

WOW !

Hal has just written an amazing PowerShell script which creates an RSS feed, when he first mentioned this I wondered how it could be used but then when you see his example WOW !

Check out Hal's Blog article here: http://halr9000.com/article/636

And start adding your Virtual Infrastructure events to an RSS feed, Hals example is here:

http://halr9000.com/test/feed.rss

VMWorld 2009 VCP Special Prices

2008-11-11T22:26:00.001Z

Just a reminder that if you are looking to attend VMWorld 2009 and you are a VCP you are eligible for a discounted price of 650 Euros….

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/registration/cost

VMworld VCP

VMworld VCP members are eligible for a discounted Full Conference rate of € 650. This discount will automatically be applied when you provide your VCP membership number, along with a valid email address, during the registration process. If the appropriate discount is not applied please contact VMworld Europe 2009 Registration Team. VCP pricing is not subject to enrolment date and will be valid throughout the enrolment period.

VMware Communities Roundtable

2008-11-11T22:15:00.001Z

To listen to the Podcast being recorded live and experience all the fun of the chat room attend this weeks VMware Communities Roundtable;

Date: 12th November 2008

Time: 08:00 GMT – 15:00 EST

VMware experts talk about VMware news, interesting virtualization posts, and what's happening in the VMware Communities.

Check here for a countdown to the podcast and to join closer to the time.

Virtualising Citrix/XenApp on VMware

2008-11-11T20:30:00.002Z

As part of some investigation into virtualising Citrix servers I decided to evaluate the use of Windows 2003 32 bit Standard servers running as virtual machines on VMware ESX. The reasoning behind the use of virtual machines is to try and issue more Citrix sessions to a single server therefore reducing the amount of hardware, data center space, power consumption and heat generated by the multiple physical servers.

Moving to VMware should allow for multiple machines to run on a physical server, allowing for a higher user load by adding more smaller loaded servers to the physical server.

This obviously depends on how Citrix is used in your environment, as Citrix applications that are published to users who open the application and minimise it until they need the app, using there desktop applications most of the time will have much a lower utalisation impact than users who use full Citrix desktops.

It will also depend on the kind of applications that you are using and how CPU/Memory intensive these applications are.

Test Platform

In order to test this, and other environments, I have been using Citrix Edgesight for Load Testing. Edgesight for Load Testing allows me to develop “scripts” that simulate a user load. These scripts are made up of various user interactions, such as use of the Office products, and can then be replayed with various time parameters to simulate a real world load. Each script can be run in the context of a user session (separate users for each session) and so allowing us to get somewhere near generating a “real world” load.

The generated script is run against a specified server and the times taken to perform each action can be measured along with the built in Virtual Infrastructure performance statistics and graphs.

Physical Server (ESX Host) Specification

DELL PowerEdge 2950 III
2 x Quad Core Intel Xeon X5450, 2X6MB Cache, 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB
32GB FB 667MHz Memory (8x4GB dual rank DIMMs)
2 x Intel PRO 1000VT Quad Port Gigabit Network Card, PCI-E
Emulex LPe-12002-E, Dual-port 8Gbps Fibre Channel PCI-Express HBA card
2 x 73GB 15.000 rpm 3.5-inch SAS Hard Drives
ESX 3.5 Update 1

Virtual Machine Specification

1 x vCPU (Using VMware process affinity to tie the VM to a specific CPU core)
4GB RAM
1 x 20GB Hard Disk Stored on SAN
1 x vNic (1GB)

Virtual Machine Software Specification

Windows 2003 R2 32 Bit Standard Edition SP1
Citrix Presentation Enterprise 4.0 Rollup pack PSE400W2K3R03 plus additional hotfixes
Office 2003 with latest Service Pack

Other Configuration

The Virtual machines, ESX Hosts and VMTools were configured specifically to adjust the virtual machines for best performance of Citrix using multiple best practice and configuration documents.

Test Script

The test script was made up of 3 core sections that invoked the use of the following software:

Outlook 2003
Word 2003
Excel 2003

For each of the scripts the programs would be opened, used (either opening email or opening documents), and then left open and the next program opened. Once the Excel test had finished the test closed all of the Office applications and started again with Outlook. This was repeated until the allotted test time was completed and the user was then logged off.

Test Load

These tests were carried out with a number of users per virtual machine. The virtual machine was configured with 1 x vCPU to maximise the number of virtual machines that could be hosted on each host, as the host has 8 cores each core could host a virtual machine.

Test 1 – 10 Users

Test

Time Period

Users Logged On

Details

20 minutes

· Logged 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Kept 10 users logged on and working for 15 minutes

· Logged 5 users off over a 5 minute period

Test 2 - 20 Users

Test

Time Period

Users Logged On

Details

25 minutes

· Logged 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Logged another 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Kept 20 users logged on and working for 15 minutes

· Logged all 20 users off over a 5 minute period

Test 3 – 25 Users

Test

Time Period

Users Logged On

Details

33 minutes

· Logged 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Logged another 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Logged another 5 users on and working over 3 minutes

· Kept 25 users logged on and working for 15 minutes

· Logged all 25 users off over a 5 minute period

Test 4 – 30 Users

Test

Time Period

Users Logged On

Details

35 minutes

· Logged 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Logged another 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Kept 30 users logged on and working for 15 minutes

· Logged all 30 users off over a 5 minute period

Test 4 – 35 Users

Test

Time Period (Minutes)

Users Logged On

Details

38 minutes

· Logged 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Logged another 10 users on and working over 5 minutes

· Logged another 5 users on and working over 3 minutes

· Kept 35 users logged on and working for 15 minutes

· Logged all 35 users off over a 5 minute period

Results

During the tests CPU/Memory/Disk and Network figures were monitored, as the users were added to the virtual machines it was clear the application set used for testing were CPU bound and although all other figures were consistently monitored these would not take as heavy an impact as CPU.

From the above graphs we can see where the users were logging into the virtual machines and where the sessions conducted there test patterns, after an initial spike in the login period the figures averaged out at the following:

10 Users – Averaged at 40% CPU Usage
20 Users – Averaged at 65% CPU Usage
25 Users – Averaged at 73% CPU Usage
30 Users – Averaged at 81% CPU Usage
35 Users – Averaged at 87% CPU Usage

Conclusion

Based on this testing and the environment we used, 25 users per single vCPU guest seems feasible (possibly a few more) but my opinion 30+ users is pushing sensible extended period CPU load due to resources needing to be made available for the tasks which will use the CPU for larger and longer periods of time which may impact the other running users of that particular machine.

If we extrapolate this out, it could mean 200+ (25 * 8) sessions on 8 guest machines across the 8 processor cores of the Dell 2950.

Please note that the current version of ESX at the time of writing this document is ESX 3.5 Update 3. As VMware continue to improve memory and CPU handling techniques it is feasible that further tests on this version may provide more sessions per virtual machine.

Unfortunately I was unable to get anywhere near the numbers that VMware achieved in there scalability document.

If you have any experience in virtualising Citrix or if you have any further tweaking or tuning tips please leave a comment below.

Part 2: Citrix on VMware, 1vCPU or 2vCPU ?

Powershell Panel

2008-11-10T20:16:00.006Z

Ever wondered what Jonathan Medd from the get-scripting podcast looks like as well as sounds like ?

In an interview at TechEd in Barcelona Jonathan hosts a great Panel with some of the big names in Powershell, this is a must see, some great discussions in there....

Click here to see the video

VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 3 Released

2008-11-07T20:26:00.001Z

Download it here

What's New

The following information provides highlights of some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware Infrastructure 3:

Note: Not all combinations of VirtualCenter and ESX Server versions are supported and not all of these highlighted features are available unless you are using VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 3 with ESX Server 3.5 Update 3. See the ESX Server, VirtualCenter, and Virtual Infrastructure Client Compatibility Matrixes for more information on compatibility.

New features and supported IO devices:

Increase in vCPU per Core Limit — The limit on vCPUs per core has been raised from 8 (or 11 for VDI workloads) to 20. This change only raises the supported limit but does not include any additional performance optimizations. Raising the limit allows users more flexibility to configure systems based on specific workloads and to get the most advantage from increasingly faster processors. The achievable number of vCPUs per core will depend on the workload and specifics of the hardware. It is expected that most deployments will remain within the previous range of 8-11 vCPUs per core. For more information, see VI3 Performance Best Practices and Benchmarking Guidelines.
HP BL495c support — This release adds support for the HP Blade Server BL495c with all Virtual Connect and IO Options allowing 1 or 10Gb connection to the network (upstream) and 1Gb connections only to the servers (downstream).
Newly Supported NICs — This release adds support for the following NICs:
- Broadcom 5716 1Gb
- Broadcom 57710 10Gb Adapters
- Broadcom 57711 10Gb Adapters at 1Gb speed only
Note: iSCSI/TOE hardware offloads available with these adapters are not supported by VMware with ESX 3.5.
Newly Supported SATA Controllers— This release adds support for the following SATA controllers:
- Broadcom HT1000 (supported in native SATA mode only with SATA hard drives and Solid State Disk devices)
- Intel ICH-7 (supported in IDE/ATA mode only with SATA CD/DVD drives)
Note: Storing VMFS data stores on drives connected to these controllers is not supported
Newly Supported Guest Operating Systems — Support for the following Guest Operating Systems have been added by VMware during the ESX 3.5 Update 3 release cycle:
- Solaris 10 U5
- Ubuntu 8.04.1
- RHEL 4.7
Internal SAS networked storage controllers — This release adds experimental support for Intel Modular Server MFSYS25 SAS Storage Control Modules (SCMs). For known issues with this platforms and workaround see SAS Link and Port Failovers with the Intel Modular Server Running Update 3 and Later Versions of ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5
(KB 1007394).
Interrupt Coalescing (IC) for Qlogic 4Gb FC HBAs — Introduced in this release, the feature reduces CPU utilization (and CPU cost per IO) and improves throughput of IO intensive workloads by generating a single interrupt for a burst of Fibre Channel frames, when received in a short period of time, rather than interrupting the CPU each time a frame is received. The feature is enabled by default.
Experimental Support for the VMDK Recovery Tool — This release adds support for the VMDK Recovery tool, a script intended to help customers to recover VMFS/vmdk data stores from accidental deletion of VMFS/vmdk data store or physical disk corruption. For more information, see VMDK Recovery Tool (ESX 3.5 Update 3) ( KB 1007243).
Small Footprint CIM Broker — Updated SFCB to version 1.3.0
IBM SAN Volume Controller — SVC is now supported with Fixed Multipathing Policy as well as MRU Multipathing Policy.

ESX4 in Workstation 6.5.1

2008-11-06T23:15:00.002Z

I had tried this already as I don't have any spare hardware at the moment but I just wanted to say a massive thanks to Eric, our test systems will live on !

A few weeks ago I filled a support request, because I couldn’t start a virtual machine on ESX4 while ESX4 was hosted on Workstation 6.5.0. ESX4 kept crashing at 95% during the VM Power On. An anonymous source just brought me up-to-date and whispered the following:
The WS 6.5 bug you noted earlier has been fixed. You will be able to run nested VMs under ESX 4.0 under WS 6.5.1, subject to the usual caveats (hardware virtualization has to be supported on your host for running the outer guest, and the inner guest is restricted to 32-bits). I can't comment on release schedules, but it is only a dot-dot release, so it can't be too far off.

Original post: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/737-Running-ESX4-under-Workstation-6.5.1-will-be-supported.html

Special Edition: Get-Scripting Podcast

2008-11-05T08:27:00.001Z

Jonathan has been busy at TechEd 2008 in Barcelona, we managed to get him hosting a PowerShell Panel discussion with some of the the top names in powershell, I highly recommend listening to the new episode...

Welcome to Episode 4 of the Get-Scripting podcast! Tune in to listen to us talk and interview people about Powershell.

This episode was recorded live on Tuesday 4th November at TechEd EMEA, Barcelona and features only the recorded Powershell Panel Discussion.

Please bear in mind that it was recorded in a large exhibition hall full of people, so there is a lot of background noise going on during the discussion - the content was so good I decided to get this out as I guess an 'out of band' episode and you never know I might even beat the Teched website for which it was also videoed.

A big thank you goes to PowershellCommunity.org for helping put this discussion panel together. We were joined by:

Ben Pearce - Microsoft
Richard Siddaway - Powershell MVP
Dmitry Sotnikov - Powershell MVP
James O'Neill - Microsoft
Tobias Weltner - Powershell MVP
Jeffrey Snover - Microsoft and Powershell Creator
Mow - Powershell MVP

Download the episode here

Free GUI builder tool for PowerShell

2008-11-04T08:25:00.000Z

SAPIEN have just announced a free forms tool for PowerShell, now you can add a GUI to the amazing powershell scripts which you have been creating and make them easier for your colleagues to use.

Looks like all the normal form type controls ere there ready for you to drag and drop so why not download it now and start building an application.... Download here

To get started they have even given you an online beginners tutorial

TechEd 2008 PowerShell Panel Discussion

2008-11-03T15:51:00.004Z

Good luck to Jonathan Medd, he's up there with the big guys now !

There’s a correction to the TechEd EMEA (IT Forum) PowerShell agenda. Tomorrow (Tuesday, Nov 4) 2-3 pm there will a PowerShell Panel Discussion on a stage adjacent to the Tech´Talk Fishbowl.

This is not in your conference agenda books so please take your pen and add it in yourself!

The invited speakers include:

Jeffrey Snover
MoW
Richard Siddaway
James O’Neill
Jonathan Medd
Dmitry Sotnikov

It’s going to be fun, so make sure you come and join us in this open panel discussion!

http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/powershell-panel-it-forum/

Control Multiple VC's

2008-10-31T15:17:00.003Z

Control multiple VC's with vCenter Administrator Portal Server.

One of the things mentioned at the UK VMware user group was the freely available VMware appliance that can manage multiple Virtual Centers from the same pain of glass, for those of you looking for the link check here:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/10/vcenter-adminis.html

Two great VI Plugins available

2008-10-31T14:24:00.004Z

Icomasoft have released two great plugins, well worth a download....

Rescan Plugin

icomasoft® provides you a simple VMware VI Client plugin (VirtualCenter and ESX Host support) for automating the Rescan/Refresh SAN Task of VMware ESX Hosts.

Just right-click on a Host or Group object (Cluster, DataCenter) and choose rescan – done.

Don´t need to script a rescan process or even manually rescan all your hosts. That´s the best way for not getting into trouble with missing Datastore mappings because of a forgotten Rescan – and losing virtual machines because of a host downtime within a HA Cluster.

Check here for more info

Powershell Plugin

icomasoft® VI PowerScripter 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 software delivers predefined functions 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.

Check here for more info

ESX Update 3

2008-10-31T14:23:00.002Z

Looks like ESX Update 3 will be released soon, hopefully without the trial period too.

http://www.vinternals.com/2008/10/esx-35-update-3-release-imminent.html

VMware London User group

2008-10-30T22:34:00.002Z

Ok, so I attended my first VMware London User Group today, not strictly sure that I should have attended seeing as I’m from deepest darkest Wiltshire (I can put a fake cockney accent on pretty well govna).

Im now typing this on the train home and was left with a few questions……

Was it worth the £50 train ticket and £5 parking fees at the station car park ?
Was it worth the fact that I got to the train station in plenty of time only to find out the train had been cancelled and I had to catch the next one?
Was it worth the tube taking 45 minutes to get to the location meaning I was an embarrassing 45 minutes late after the train fiasco ?
Was it worth the tube being delayed on the way home and having to wait 1hr 10 minutes for the next one ?
Is it worth me sat next to the guy with the biggest snoring problem in England?

One word……

DEFINITELY !

As I got to the location where the meeting was being held I made my way into the back of the room just as I heard my name being mentioned, there were around 50ish people in the room and I wondered why the presenter was asking If I was there, I later found out that he had recently added me to his list of blogs that he reads (Hi Alaric) and he was telling the attendees to check out the scripts I had written using the VI Toolkit.

Compellent Storage

After finally sitting down and forgetting about the horrendous train journey I started to relax, as Alaric Davis finished his introductory speech (sorry I missed it) Andy Hardy from Compellent took the stage and proceeded to tell us about his company and the Storage equipment they produce, a cutting edge product that it seamed would be suited to most infrastructures looking for a quality storage solution.

All the benefits of VMware’s server virtualisation – from reduced hardware costs and simplified management to robust disaster recovery – can be amplified across the data center with Compellent’s feature-rich SAN. A unique Dynamic Block Architecture makes Compellent a perfect match for Virtualised environments, allowing you to create a virtual pool of storage and automatically manage it at the block level.

This enables the use of both high end and slow disks to produce the most optimal performance which is managed by the SAN itself. Seamed like a great product to me and I will certainly be handing out the information to the contract I am working on at the moment which is undergoing a SAN refresh.

If you’re thinking about storage then I strongly suggest you check out the Compellent products and give Andy a ring, a thoroughly nice guy.

Lifecycle Manager

Next up was Alexy Stokes, a specialist systems engineer from VMware who gave us a great insight into lifecycle manager, a product which is used to request, create, deploy, update, track, and decommission VM’s. It does this using a customisable Intranet portal based application, where users can choose and deploy VM’s which will then follow through a set of approvers, and rules to best place the VM, build the VM and present it to the users.

An interesting product that it seamed to me should be part of a bigger product that should merge Lifecycle manager, Stage Manager and Lab manager.

Lifecycle manager seamed to come in two forms, the locked version which was a set application that could fit into most companies and work along there current procedures to guide and add accountability for the full lifecycle of creating a VM, which isn’t a bad thing as most companies I have worked in or for do not update there processes to account for VM’s which means that the justification that was needed for the physical servers is no longer needed for virtual servers thus leading to sprawl.

There was also the unlocked version of Lifecycle Manager which enabled a tiered solution of deploying machines to meet customer needs and business process allowing for the locked version to be opened up and fully customised (with the help of VMware or some Javascript developers). It can be manipulated to incorporate custom asset, license key databases and other such existing systems.

Both versions can be customised to meet the style of your current intranet allowing the application to seem part of an integrated business application.

Once the VM’s have gone through the process the users are then presented with a webpage which allows them to perform common tasks on the vm such as snapshot, power on/off, reset, console access through http, and rdp to the newly created server.

He then showed us how this fit into the other similar products like Lab Manager & Stage Manager.

I spent quite a bit of time afterwards in the pub talking to Alexey who struck me as a very clever and friendly person, hopefully I will meet him again in the future.

Round Table

Following the excellent presentation on Lifecycle manager there was an interesting QA type round table in which we managed to talk about some of the areas where we had found issues, some of the finer issues in VI and other useful subjects. I found this to be a highly useful part of the meeting which allowed the attendees to pick the brains of the expert panel at the front of the stage. Hopefully there will be a repeat of this in future meetings, this really allowed us to ask the lingering questions and discuss the areas you always wanted to know.

VMworld recap

The bit I had been looking forward too, the VMworld recap, this was presented by Richard Garsthagen and took us through some of the big announcements made at VMworld, still not sure what we are allowed to blog about on this subject so I wont elaborate too much but will provide you a link for the extended presentation by the Richard and all the other slides from the VMUKUG which will be uploaded here, again, I strongly recommend you give a quick look if you are interested in the future developments of VI, he gave a great demo of some of the future enhancements due in the next version of VI (Apparently not being named VI4) Vservices, vNetwork and lots of other vWords.

Conclusion

So, all in all despite the fact that I’m a contractor and don’t get paid to take days off and attend such events, this was a very useful training exercise and highly recommendable to anyone thinking about going to the next user groups, the friendly presenters and attendees made the event a great experience and not just because there was £500 behind the bar afterwards!

If your reading this, thanks very much guys, oh yeah apple and pairs and all that geeza !

As always your comments are welcome, please leave them by clicking the comments link below.

Veeam Configurator Beta

2008-10-29T13:49:00.003Z

Now this looks useful, Im forever seeing slight misconfiguration on many of the contracts I work on and as we know this can cause upset for things like HA, DRS and VMotion. Veeam Configurator should eliminate these issues applying a standard set of configuration to the servers and reducing the potential for misconfiguration issues.

Plus it saves you time configuring the hosts, which I'm all for !

Discover, manage and enforce your ESX servers’ configuration from a single interface

Setting up and properly configuring your ESX servers isn’t difficult. But over time, things can change. How do you know which ESX servers are still configured as intended, and which have “drifted”? Veeam Configurator helps to ensure that your ESX server configuration complies with corporate policies and standards across your entire VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3).

With Veeam Configurator, you can quickly and easily discover the current settings for all your ESX hosts, review and adjust the captured configuration sets as needed, and use that information to define your baseline configuration templates. These templates can then be applied to groups of ESX servers simultaneously, allowing you to centrally manage the configuration of all the ESX servers in your environment.

You can think of Veeam Configurator as essentially a “group policy” for your ESX servers. Similarly to Windows Group Policy, Veeam configuration templates allow you to take complete control of your ESX servers, making sure that existing servers are fully compliant with your corporate standards, and simplifying the provisioning of new ESX servers.

Find more information and download a trial here

Running ESX and ESXi in VMware Workstation

2008-10-29T12:53:00.003Z

We have been able to run ESX and ESXi in VMware workstation for a while now, I find it particularly useful for testing and for the odd demonstration.

If you are unsure how to do this I came across a nice article today which includes a step by step video on how to configure this useful feature...

http://www.petri.co.il/running-vmware-esx-and-esxi-in-workstation-on-your-desktop-pc.htm

It reads...

In the following new video, I demonstrate, step by step, how you can run VMware ESX Server 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 inside VMware Workstation 6.5. This is also shown in my Train Signal VMware ESX Server video training course.

While you wouldn't run ESX in Workstation for a production server, running ESX in Workstation is an excellent way to test and demonstrate ESX Server (and the entire VMware Virtual Infrastructure suite) on a single PC. Think about it - what if you had a single PC with 2 ESX Servers, an iSCSI virtual SAN, and a Windows Server running Virtual Center. With that, you would have "VMware Infrastructure in a box" and be able to run powerful features like VMotion, SVMotion, VMHA, and Update Manager, all on a single PC.

VMworld Europe 2009

2008-10-25T15:59:00.007+01:00

Register now to take advantage of the
Early Bird Pricing.

The Americans have done, it now it's Europe's turn....If anyone feels like 'sponsering' me to go please just let me know :)

Now in its second year, VMworld Europe is the must-attend event for all IT professionals looking for actionable ideas, innovative products and best practices for virtualizing the enterprise – from the desktop to the datacenter.

Learn
Get new ideas to take back to your office and stay up-to-date with the latest virtualization technologies. VMworld Europe 2009 offers a content-rich program:

Breakout Sessions - Hear the experts share their knowledge about a variety of virtualization topics - desktop virtualization, virtualizing business critical applications, technology, architecture, or planning and operating a datacenter.

Hands-on labs - Gain valuable hands-on experience in these instructor-led labs, where you can see the technology first-hand and ask the experts questions in an interactive environment.

Self-paced workshops - Explore the technology on your own in a hands-on environment at your own pace.

Experience
This year, over 100 companies will showcase cutting-edge virtualization products and services at the Solutions Exchange. Drop by and experience for yourself the solutions that are helping companies solve complex IT and business challenges.

Network
Meet and mingle with peers and virtualization experts. You’ll have ample opportunity to connect, share ideas and learn from like-minded professionals.

Don’t miss out — Register Now!
Register today to join your peers at VMworld Europe 2009, the leading virtualization event.

Powershell Email - Mark Important

2008-10-23T16:26:00.004+01:00

Just a quick tip, to set an email so that it shows up as urgent in outlook (Shows a !) use the following code when setting up the email...

$msg.Priority = [System.Net.Mail.MailPriority]::High

To see how to send the rest of the email check here

UK London VMware User Group

2008-10-21T19:45:00.004+01:00

The next UK London VMware User Group meeting has been announced, sponsored by Compellent (www.compellent.com), to be held on Thursday 30th October 2008.

The meeting will be held at the Capital 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.

Reception is from 1230 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm.

Agenda:

12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:15 Welcome & News
13:20 – 14:05 Sponsor Presentation - Compellent
14:10 – 14:55 Presentation on Lifecycle Manager by Alexey Stokes, VMware
15:00 – 15:20 Refreshments Break
15:25 – 16:00 "If I knew then what I know now" Virtualization lessons learned, Tom Brand, Morse
16:05 – 16:45 VMworld debrief and VI4 - what we can tell you
16:45 – 17:00 Close
17:00 – Pub

Please feel free to contribute to the 'UG content ideas' forum thread here.

The meeting organisers will not be able to incorporate any of the ideas for this coming meeting, but they will do there best to include some of them next time.

To register your interest in attending, please see the forum for details. If you do not receive a confirmation mail, please don't just turn up since they will not be able to admit you to the meeting.

If your going look out for me !

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTMs

2008-10-21T19:42:00.001+01:00

Yes, the long awaited System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (I'm sure they could have thought of a longer title) has just gone RTM.

See here for the full story

Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0

2008-10-21T19:37:00.003+01:00

Veeam have just released a new version of there popular reporting application, I'm working on a powershell script that will produce similar functionality to the Visio diagram and mostly everything else can also be done in powershell but still, its nice to have it all in one app.....

Veeam Reporter Enterprise is the first reporting solution specifically designed for large VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) virtual environments. Veeam Reporter Enterprise provides unattended data collection and scheduled or ad hoc reporting, as well as centralized data storage to help you discover, document and report on all the objects within your VMware virtual infrastructure right now, and at any point in the past.

Reporter Enterprise collects information about your VI3 environment, its components and configuration settings, on an ongoing basis. Using this data, it provides comprehensive and easy-to-understand reports for analysis, documentation and change control.

Designed for use by VI3 administrators, system integrators and datacenter managers, it is fully integrated with VMware VirtualCenter and supports change control for both ESX and ESXi servers.

Download a trial here

Powershell Audit Script

2008-10-15T19:23:00.004+01:00

Time for my first stab at WMI, I have just completed my audit script which will give you a nice html audit of each of the computers in a file or if run with no parameters and it will use localhost.

This is a conversion of an old vbscript which I have been using for a while, updated and enhanced and very much quicker !

Usage: Audit.ps1 'c:\servers.txt' or just run Audit.ps1 with no parameters to audit the localhost.

The txt file must consist of each server on an individual line.

Best viewed in IE but will work in firefox (minus the expanding of cells)

As always your comments are welcome.

Free ESX Secuirty Compliance Checker

2008-10-14T09:50:00.003+01:00

Compliance Checker is a free, downloadable tool that provides a real time compliance check for multiple VMware ESX host servers at a time.

This product is a robust utility providing detailed compliance checks against both the VMware Hardening Guidelines and the CIS benchmarks for ESX. Unlike other free tools in the market, Compliance Checker is a fully functional product.

For example, you can print the reports that Compliance Checker produces, and can run compliance checks across multiple ESX servers at once.

Download it here

Powershell Email Locks attachment

2008-10-11T10:05:00.003+01:00

I came across an issue when I was trying to manipulate a file which I had just emailed using the standard email code which is on multiple places on the web.

All descriptions on the web (that I have seen) which show how to do this so far have left the email attachment open which means if the script is continuing after the email and you wish to use the file you have attached you will not be able to as it will show as locked, use this example to close the attached file correctly using .Dispose()

Thanks to Jaykul on the Powershell IRC channel.

Powershell Citrix License Alerts

2008-10-09T20:33:00.002+01:00

We had an issue today where we ran out of Citrix Licenses and therefore some of the users were unable to login, the Citrix License server seems to be a pretty basic app with alerting feature.

After purchasing and installing some licenses so that the users could gain access to there applications again we started thinking about ways to monitor this so it didn't happen again.

I was sure we could monitor this using powershell and started to look into it, first thing I came across was a BSonPoSH article explaining how to get license information from WMI, that guy has done some impressive stuff with Citrix and powershell, check it out on his site.

Ok, so all looked fine and dandy, until we ran it and found that one of our licenses was not showing in the figures :(

Looking into it a bit more and exploring WMI gave us the same results, one of the licenses was missing. Sod's law says it was the one we were after too !

Looking on the Internet again it would seem this is a "known problem" which there is a private fix for.

Not to be beaten I thought of other ways to get this information, I know I had pulled information from websites before so decided to try and access the information direct from the license web page.

Looking at the html code that was dumped, it was changing, this made it hard to just read the specific lines I wanted, so as you can see from the code I searched for the license type I wanted 'Enterprise' and then worked out where the figures are that I needed from there.

If nothing, this is a useful script to see how to retrieve html information and work with it to get the end results.

Run it normally and if the License usage is above 90% it will fire off an email or run it with the send parameter to send an email anyway.

Any comments or quires please leave a comment below.

Download the script here

UK Powershell User Group

2008-10-07T16:02:00.006+01:00

Powershell Introduction: Objects and get-member
PowerGUI SQL Server Reporting Services powerpack
PowerShell in SQL Server 2008

If you want to attend please send an email to powershell-uk@hotmail.co.uk expressing your interest.

Re-posted from http://richardsiddaway.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!43CFA46A74CF3E96!1806.entry

VI4 Video's

2008-10-06T15:34:00.009+01:00

First rule of ESX4 is you cant talk about ESX4
Second rule of ESX4 is you cant talk about ESX4

But im just linking to another sight right ?!?

Just came across some VI4 / ESX4 videos that look interesting, also included is a look at the new vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 4.0 interface.

Original source at virtualisation.info

VC 2.5 Update 3

2008-10-06T13:45:00.001+01:00

Update 3 is now available from the VMware download site, lets hope there are no date issue this time :)

Get the update here

Using Powershell to make you money

2008-10-06T12:11:00.002+01:00

We recently had to get some lists together for the Licensing department as there are virtualisation deals which can be used to reduce the amount of licensing costs for your VM's.

Im not sure what they are this week but last time I checked you could license all VM's on one host with 1 Data center license. I think there are also deals for 3 vm's per Enterprise license or similar ?

So with the following powershell script we were able to integrate the VI toolkit with WMI information to gain the information needed...

connect-viserver MYVISERVER
$vms = Get-VM | select-object Name, Host

$myCol = @()
foreach ($vm in $vms)
{
$MyDetails = "" | select-Object Host, Name, OS
$MyDetails.Host = $vm.Host
$MyDetails.Name = $vm.Name
$OSDetails = Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem -computername $vm.Name
$MyDetails.OS = $OSDetails.Caption
$myCol += $MyDetails
}
$myCol | sort Host

Sample output:

Host : HOST01.TEST.gov.uk
Name : TEST01
OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

Host : HOST01.TEST.gov.uk
Name : TEST03
OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

Host : HOST02.TEST.gov.uk
Name : TEST02
OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

Hyper-V Resources

2008-10-03T12:39:00.005+01:00

As Hyper-V is now available Microsoft have some on-line presentations taken from the virtualisation launch last month.

These are available on their website at :
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/getvirtualnow.mspx.
A good overview of Hyper-V is at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/assets/media/hdbp/local/msm.htm, which is one of the breakout sessions entitled “Hyper-V Deployment and Best Practises”.

Thanks to AP

IP'08 & VM'08 - Day 1 Review

2008-10-01T20:18:00.001+01:00

Day 1 sounded good, can't wait to attend tomorrow....

Earls Court 2 buzzed with activity from the moment the enthusiastic voice announced that IP'08 and the new VM'08 were open for business. It was standing room only in the seminars and keynotes, particularly for the virtualisation sessions - there was a palpable sense of anticipation and curiosity for what is still, for many organisations, a new concept in computer engineering. Wth Microsoft, Citrix and VMware showing the latest solutions in action.

Among the exhibitors, the mood was surprisingly optimistic given the recent upheavals on Wall Street and Threadneedle Street, summed up by porttracker’s Caroline Barker-Littley: “If companies can get more out of their existing resources, it is good news at a time of belt-tightening. Tools like ours that can discover and re-utilise seemingly lost ports – just as virtualisation can utilise unused and ‘lost' server capacity – become very attractive when efficiency is a priority.”

From the get-go there was little room to swing a virtual desktop on the stands of IP show regulars such as Avaya, handling wide-ranging enquiries from security to Unified Communications. Avaya keynote speaker Martyn Lambert noted that visitors were anxious to cope with the rapid pace of technological and social change and the need to respond effectively: “They know that if they haven’t got a strategy for customers using Web 2.0 and social networking phenomena, such as Facebook and blogging, their competitors will. It’s an exciting time to be here.”.

Map your VI using Netmap

2008-09-29T13:20:00.005+01:00

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

2008-09-29T12:13:00.004+01:00

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

2008-09-28T12:04:00.006+01:00

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

2008-09-26T16:27:00.005+01:00

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

2008-09-24T15:56:00.002+01:00

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

2008-09-24T15:52:00.001+01:00

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

2008-09-24T12:57:00.005+01:00

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

2008-09-23T13:25:00.003+01:00

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

Checking logs

2008-09-22T10:34:00.002+01:00

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

2008-09-20T13:52:00.004+01:00

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

2008-09-19T08:47:00.003+01:00

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

2008-09-16T21:30:00.004+01:00

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

VMware Fault Tolerance

VMware DVS

Host Profiles

Datastore Capacity

2008-09-15T23:12:00.004+01:00

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

2008-09-15T11:29:00.004+01:00

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

2008-09-12T22:05:00.003+01:00

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

MS to buy Citrix ?!

2008-09-12T09:19:00.002+01:00

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

2008-09-10T10:39:00.004+01:00

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

2008-09-09T18:49:00.002+01:00

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

VI Toolkit Competition Winners

2008-09-09T15:07:00.006+01:00

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

2008-09-09T13:41:00.004+01:00

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

Virtu-Al

This site has moved

The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative

VI Toolkit Quick Reference Guide

More Network Info

PowerGUI - Get started the easy way

vCenter Converter 4.0 - Out Now

VMworld Europe - Come say Hi

Virtualisation City

VMware Infrastructure PowerPack 2.1 for PowerGUI

Provison ESX Hosts through Powershell

Veeam Backup and FastSCP

Next London VM User Group announced

New Blog layout

vDiagram – VMGuru Style

vDiagram - Draw your VI with one script

VI3 Quick Reference Card

Should I virtualise Exchange ?

Reservations / Limits and Shares

Check Cluster Configurations

vExpert

Powershell Workstation/Server Audit script update

Windows 7 Public Beta

Vizioncore Leads the Way with Full Support for VMware’s ESXi

Virtual Twits

Removing SCVMM from vCenter

List VM's with RDM

Powershell V2 CTP3

Veeam Monitor 3.0 Free Edition

New VMWare Powerpack for PowerGui

Extra fields in the VI Client

PrimalForms Example (Virtual Center Log)

Top 10 PowerShell Scripts

Microsoft NLB Error when trying to Cluster Cloned VM’s

Detailed VMware Host Network Information

Who deleted my VM ?

Getting Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express to index PowerShell script (.PS1) files

Extracting Cisco Discovery Protocol Info

Managing VMWare Infrastructure with PowerShell

Observed IP Ranges

Get-Scripting now !

Citrix on VMware, 1vCPU or 2vCPU ?

Getting VMware Host Physical Nic Speeds

Unable to format a LUN

Checking CPU Affinity

Is MSCS Supported on a HA/DRS Cluster ?

PowerGui 1.5.3 Released

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 - Warning

Last Call: UK PowerShell Use Group

UK Powershell User Group

Correct HAL Installed ?

RSS VI Events - Posh RSS Feed

VMWorld 2009 VCP Special Prices

VMworld VCP

VMware Communities Roundtable

Virtualising Citrix/XenApp on VMware

Powershell Panel

VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 3 Released

Download it here

What's New

ESX4 in Workstation 6.5.1

Special Edition: Get-Scripting Podcast

Free GUI builder tool for PowerShell

TechEd 2008 PowerShell Panel Discussion

Control Multiple VC's

Two great VI Plugins available

ESX Update 3

VMware London User group

Veeam Configurator Beta

Discover, manage and enforce your ESX servers’ configuration from a single interface

Running ESX and ESXi in VMware Workstation

VMworld Europe 2009

Register now to take advantage of theEarly Bird Pricing.

Powershell Email - Mark Important

UK London VMware User Group

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTMs

Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0

Powershell Audit Script

Free ESX Secuirty Compliance Checker

Powershell Email Locks attachment

Register now to take advantage of the
Early Bird Pricing.