About VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows PowerShell
June 19, 2012 5 Comments
In PowerCLI you can use the Get-Stat cmdlet to get performance statistics. But for Microsoft Windows virtual machines with the VMware Tools installed there is another way to get the statistics. Even without using PowerCLI. Read more of this post
June 3, 2012 13 Comments
Recently we get vSphere alarms in our environment that say for instance:
“[VMware vCenter – Alarm Host error] Issue detected on host in datastore: ScsiDeviceIO: 2368: Failed write command to write-quiesced partition naa.600a0b8000111155000021c53f97784e:1 (42:01:04:07.994 cpu7:5191)”
There seems to be a problem on a partition. But which datastore is on this partition? We can use PowerCLI to find the datastore involved. Read more of this post
May 29, 2012 21 Comments
For our Boot From SAN servers we wanted to know the SCSI Lun number of the disks. You can get this information via WMI. But to retrieve it you need four different WMI objects. I made a PowerShell advanced function that combines these four WMI objects to relate the disk with the LUN number. Read more of this post
February 18, 2012 7 Comments
Last year there was a post on the PowerCLI Team blog called How to speed-up the execution of the first PowerCLI cmdlet. That post showed commands you need to execute to pre-compile some of the PowerCLI code to prevent this from being done in every PowerCLI session.
Running these commands will speed-up the execution of the first PowerCLI cmdlet you run in your session. The blog post was made before PowerCLI 5.0 was released and didn’t show the commands to speed-up PowerCLI 5.0. Later there was a post at the vNugglets blog Speed Up First PowerCLI 5 cmdlet — Precompile XMLSerializers that shows the commands needed for PowerCLI 5.0.
But what happens when PowerCLI 5.1 or 6.0 is released? Of course we can try to find the new commands needed to speed-up PowerCLI every time a new version is released. But would it not be easier if we have a function that will do this for you?
The Install-PowerCLIXmlSerializer function presented in this post will show you a PowerShell function that you need to run once after you install a new PowerCLI version to speed-up the execution of the first cmdlet every time you run PowerCLI. Read more of this post
January 16, 2012 Leave a comment
PowerCLI up to version 5.0.1 showed the connected servers in the title bar of the window. I found this very handy. Unfortunately though VMware has removed this feature in version 5.0.1. In this blogpost I present you a script that returns this feature. Read more of this post
January 14, 2012 3 Comments
If you are like me and managing a VMware vSphere environment is your daily job, and you want to automate your job as much as possible, you probably always have a PowerCLI session open. PowerCLI cmdlet names are sometimes pretty long. Of course you can use tab completion. But wouldn’t it be nice if you had short aliases for the PowerCLI cmdlets? Read more of this post
January 2, 2012 5 Comments
If you install patches to your ESX(i) servers you will probably have to reboot them. But if you don’t reboot them right after installing the patches, how can you find the servers that are patched and waiting for a reboot? Read more of this post
December 7, 2011 Leave a comment
Yesterday we discovered that the system hangs, we sometimes have on our Windows Server 2008 R2 systems are caused by the video device driver. Because we don’t want to install another video driver manually in all our Windows 2008 R2 systems, we needed a script to do this. Read more of this post
November 24, 2011 8 Comments
It is a best practise to keep all the hosts of a VMware vSphere cluster at the same patch level. That means that all the hosts need to have the same patches installed. But how do you easily check if this is the case? This is where PowerCLI will help you. Read more of this post
November 19, 2011 3 Comments
If you use PowerCLI to generate reports and send those reports to you via e-mail, you probably have the sender e-mail adress and the smtp server hard coded in your script. But what if one of those changes? You will have to modify all your scripts. Wouldn’t it be easier if you have stored them in one place, so you have to change them only once? Read more of this post
Robert van den Nieuwendijk's Blog 