About VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows PowerShell
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
September 12, 2011 9 Comments
In the search engine queries that bring people to my blog, I see that some people are looking for a PowerCLI script that finds the MAC addresses of one or more virtual machines. Read more of this post
July 21, 2011 12 Comments
With the announced VMware vSphere version 5.0, ESX servers will be history. Only ESXi servers are left over. And as you might now, the main difference between ESX and ESXi is the service console that ESX has and is removed from ESXi.
To be able to manage ESXi servers, VMware is promoting the VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface (vCLI). And also the vSphere Management Assistant, which is a Linux virtual appliance with the vCLI installed in it. There is also a Microsoft Windows version of the vCLI. That runs in a Windows Command Prompt.
As a PowerShell user I don´t like writing scripts for the Command Prompt anymore. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could run the vCLI commands from PowerCLI? Read more of this post
July 18, 2011 10 Comments
Sometimes you need to find a virtual machine by MAC address. This can be very time consuming if you have to do this by hand using the VMware vSphere Client. PowerCLI can do this task for you in only a few seconds. The script presented in this blogpost will retrieve the virtual machine that has a certain MAC address. Read more of this post
July 17, 2011 4 Comments
In “Virtual machine failed to power on” Monique Vanmeulebrouk describes a problem where in one stage she needed to find an ESX server that has a certain MAC address. Of course you can log in to all your ESX servers and issue the “ifconfig | grep -i hw” command as described in the VMware Knowledge base article “Identifying the ESX Service Console MAC address”. But this method takes a lot of time. You can do this much easier with VMware vSphere PowerCLI. Read more of this post
July 4, 2011 Leave a comment
The ViewType parameter of the PowerCLI Get-View cmdlet needs a Managed Object Type as value. A list of these Managed Object Types can be found in the VMware vSphere API Reference Documentation.
However not all the Managed Object Types are valid as a value for the Get-View -ViewType parameter. The Get-View documentation doesn’t show you which Managed Object Types you can use. But if you use a Managed Object Type that is not valid, like “Alarm”, you will get an error message that shows you the valid types. Read more of this post
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