#powervi

I know I'm a little VMware-centric when it comes to PowerShell and virtualization. This shouldn't be too surprising with the features of PowerCLI combined with our PowerVI VMware tool.  

I thought I would venture off that path with a blog post I found by Ben Armstrong that explains how to export a Hyper-V virtual machine using PowerShell -

I need to automate the process of exporting a virtual machine recently – and when I checked around I found that while there are a number of sample scripts out there that show you how to do this (some even on this blog) they are all written in VBScript.  As I am now to the stage where PowerShell is my preferred scripting language – I sat down and wrote up this short script:

Jonathan Medd has posted another useful PowerShell/PowerCLI script.  This time he is looking at Cluster storage capacity.

I recently needed to provide a high level capacity overview per VMware cluster looking at some metrics of interest that were being used as a guide to the capacity state of a cluster. Note: these are by no means definitive or the ones you should be using in your environment, but for these purposes they met the requirements. The metrics I looked at per cluster were the ratio of vCPUs to pCPUs, the amount of Effective, Allocated and average Active Memory and the amount of Free Diskspace.

(read more and download script)

Found another good candidate for a PowerVI script at vNiklas.djungel.se.

If you are running too many VM´s on your datastores in your vSphere environment you can have some problems, this if your SAN is not VAAI compliant and can handle SCSI locking etc.

Alan Renouf has made a blog post about how to get a report about how many VM´s you have on every datastore, I have extended to only report on running VM´s as these are the interesting number..

(read more)

I would alter his script slightly for use in PowerVI.

Did you know that PowerVI includes a PowerShell script that lets you change the root password on multiple ESX host at one time.  This is useful if you have a policy to change the passwords regularly, but want to keep the password the same across all hosts.

To change the password -

Make sure PowerVI is installed.

Open the vSphere client and connect to your vCenter

Select all of the ESX Hosts that need to have their root password changed

Right click and select "Set Host Root Password"

PowerVI will launch a dialog that lets you specify the old password and set the new password.

Alan Renouf has a new blog post up that takes advantage of the New-VIProperty cmdlet to add the VMware tools version to the get-vm cmdlet.  you may recall that Luc Dekens had a rather extensive post a while back that talked about many cool things you could do using the New-VIProperty cmdlet.

Here's Alan's use case...

If we look at the  object which gets returned back when we use the Get-VM cmdlet you will see [...] the returned object doesn’t have a root property for ToolsVersion or ToolsVersionStatus, for this we need to delve into the ExtensionData property and have a look around, once we have found the information it is fairly easy to add these to our object using the New-VIProperty cmdlet as below: New-VIProperty -Name ToolsVersion -ObjectType VirtualMachine `     -ValueFromExtensionProperty 'Config.tools.ToolsVersion' `     -Force New-VIProperty -Name ToolsVersionStatus -ObjectType VirtualMachine `     -ValueFromExtensionProperty 'Guest.ToolsVersionStatus' `     -Force Now we have added these as a new property to our object (actually they are PowerShell Code Properties), we can use our old friend Get-VM to retrieve the information easily: Get-VM | Select Name, Version, ToolsVersion, ToolsVersionStatus

(read more)