I love a powershell challenge, and last week a colleague of mine asked me for assistance in getting the uptime of vmware hosts. My initial response did the trick: Get-View -ViewType hostsystem -Property name,runtime.boottime | Select-Object Name, @{N="UptimeDays"; E={((((get-date) - ($_.runtime).BootTime).TotalDays).Tostring()).Substring(0,5)}} However, I wasn’t completely satisfied by the the output or the ease of use. So today I went back and rewrote the code and made a function of it....

I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you guys why VMware tools is a good idea to have installed on your VMs, and probably not why it’s a good idea to keep VMware tools updated. However, I haven’t found a good way to get a neat list of which VMs need to have their VMware tools upgraded. While working on my vCenter health check script I found that I had to make my own little script to get that list....

Next in the series on getting alarms is getting datastore alarms. Again, the code is pretty similar: $Datastores = Get-View -ViewType Datastore -Property Name,OverallStatus,TriggeredAlarmstate $FaultyDatastores = $Datastores | Where-Object {$_.TriggeredAlarmState -ne "{}"} $progress = 1 $report = @() if ($FaultyDatastores -ne $null) { foreach ($FaultyDatastore in $FaultyDatastores) { foreach ($TriggeredAlarm in $FaultyDatastore.TriggeredAlarmstate) { Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering alarms" -Status "Working on $($FaultyDatastore.Name)" -PercentComplete ($progress/$FaultyDatastores.count*100) -Id 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue $entity = $TriggeredAlarm.Entity.ToString() $alarmID = $TriggeredAlarm....

The next step in my short series on getting vCenter alarms using PowerCLI is to get cluster alarms. Here’s the code: $Clusters = Get-View -ViewType ComputeResource -Property Name,OverallStatus,TriggeredAlarmstate $FaultyClusters = $Clusters | Where-Object {$_.TriggeredAlarmState -ne "{}"} $report = @() $progress = 1 if ($FaultyClusters -ne $NULL) { foreach ($FaultyCluster in $FaultyClusters) { foreach ($TriggeredAlarm in $FaultyCluster.TriggeredAlarmstate) { Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering alarms" -Status "Working on $($FaultyCluster.Name)" -PercentComplete ($progress/$FaultyClusters.count*100) -Id 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue $entity = $TriggeredAlarm....

Yesterday I wrote a post about getting vm alarms through PowerCLI. Today it’s time for getting host alarms 🙂 The code is very similar to the one for getting vm alarms, since they both use get-view to grab all info: $VMHosts = Get-View -ViewType HostSystem -Property Name,OverallStatus,TriggeredAlarmstate $FaultyVMHosts = $VMHosts | Where-Object {$_.TriggeredAlarmState -ne "{}"} $progress = 1 $report = @() if ($FaultyVMHosts -ne $null) { foreach ($FaultyVMHost in $FaultyVMHosts) { foreach ($TriggeredAlarm in $FaultyVMHost....

A few weeks ago I started to put together a health check script for our vmware environments and the first thing I wanted to have in that report is a list of triggered alarms. To my surprise there was no native cmdlet to retrieve alarms using PowerCLI, instead I had to write a short script to retrieve alarms. So here’s the the script for retrieving vm alarms: $VMs = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine -Property Name,OverallStatus,TriggeredAlarmstate $FaultyVMs = $VMs | Where-Object {$_....

Ever had a bunch of vmware hosts that you want to add a NFS datastore on? It can be quite time consuming to say the least. In our environment we have a couple of NFS stores that should be available on all vmware hosts and I really don’t want to browse around all 50 or so hosts and check if they have them and then mount them if they’re not available....

If you are using a KMS server for activating servers and clients in your environment, you may have noticed that there’s really no obvious way to get a list of all the clients that have been activated by the KMS server. One way to get that overview is by using VAMT (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824953.aspx), but since that tool is based on pulling info from clients and not from the KMS server it is not suitable for everyone....

A little while ago we have some issues with one of our Exchange environments. The symptoms was that basically everything was slow, opening address books, owa, sending mails and so on. After some digging it occurred to me that this may be DNS related, so I used a one-liner in powershell to see how fast our DNS servers responded: Measure-Command {Resolve-DnsName google.com -DnsOnly -Type A -NoHostsFile -server x.x.x.x} And sure enough, we were seeing response times in the range of 5-7 seconds....

The option for activating Server 2012 by phone is kinda hidden, so I have to write this down before I forget it: Win+R – SLUI 4