Powershell: Getting monitor info
Today I got a request from a colleague of mine that was doing inventory: What are the make, model, serial number and purchase date of your monitors? Seeing as this wasn’t something I had readily in my head I had to figure it out, but being the automation enthusiast that I am, I refused to bend over my monitors and snap a photo of it all. I wanted to find it a cooler way, the powershell way 🙂 This information is stored in WMI, so all I had to do was to grab it using Get-WmiObject and then format it rather nicely for him. The powershell script I came up with isn’t my most beautiful work, but here it is: $progress = 1 foreach ($monitor in (Get-WmiObject WmiMonitorID -Namespace root\wmi)) { Write-Host “Monitor #$($progress):” -ForegroundColor Green Write-Host “Manufactur: $(($monitor.ManufacturerName | ForEach-Object {[char]$_}) -join ”)” Write-Host “PN: ” ($($monitor.UserFriendlyName | ForEach-Object…
Powershell and the HPE 3PAR REST API
Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of using Powershell to automate some of the basic tasks we do on our HPE 3PAR systems: creating volumes, adding them to volume sets, exporting them and so on. Since my experience with REST APIs was rather limited it was quite daunting at first but once you get the hang of how REST works and the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet it’s really not that bad. Disclaimer: The examples below will vary somewhat in how I do certain things, simply because I had to learn all this from scratch. Hence, the first examples will sometimes do things “less correct” than the later examples since this also was quite the learning curve for me. The first step in doing anything with the REST API will always be to create a session key. If you’re not familiar with APIs, think of a session key as username and password combined into…
Powershell: Creating strong passwords
A tweet from @JanEgilRing caught my eye this morning, it was showing how you can use powershell to create passwords. The link in the tweet pointed here: http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/tips/archive/2016/05/23/one-liner-random-password-generator.aspx Seeing that line and realizing how simple it was, it got me thinking on how I could implement this in my scripts. The only issue I saw with that one-liner was that the passwords it creates do not necessarily comply with high complexity rules. So, how can we approve on this? Firstly, we need to create a regex that we can use to validate that the password created complies with our rules. In our environment this means 12 characters, uppercase, lowercase and either a number or special character. The regex I ended up with is this one: ^.*(?=.{12,})(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[@#$%^&+=]).*$ (which I found here: https://nilangshah.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/password-validation-via-regular-expression/ ) Now that we have our regex we can simple throw the one-liner into a while loop: while ($pass -notmatch “^.*(?=.{12,})(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[@#$%^&+=]).*$”) { $pass = -join (‘abcdefghkmnrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHKLMNPRSTUVWXYZ23456789$%&*#’.ToCharArray() |…
UCSD: Mapping EMC VNX LUNs to an ESXi cluster
I have been struggling for quite some time with mapping luns from our vnx 5600 to entire clusters in our vCenter. We used to utilize a custom workflow a consultant wrote for us, but that workflow got borked after an update to UCS Director nearly a year ago. Revisiting the issue i found this example from Cisco: https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-57382 That example seems to work for other people but in our case the custom task in it never gave the correct output, so I had to look for a way around it. The solution I came up with is overly complicated and can surely be simplified, but my lacking knowledge of javascript limits me quite a bit. My workflow to map luns to vSphere clusters consists roughly of these steps: A powershell task running a script that does the following: Queries vCenter for esxi hosts in given cluster Queries UCS Directors api for…
UCSD: Grabbing a string returned from a Powershell task
My last post described how to get around some issues with using Powershell tasks in workflows. While that post surely enables you to uilize powershell to do stuff for you, what about if you want Powershell to grab stuff for you and return them in a usable matter? This time I’m going to show you how you can return a string from Powershell and use it further down in the workflow. Cisco has provided an example on how to do that here: https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-58250 The example from Cisco is what I started with, but I have modified it a bit since I didn’t want anything that advanced. So let’s set the stage: Say you have a workflow that uses the execute powershell command task and you want that task to output something you can utilize further down in the workflow, e.g. sending that output in an email. In this case we will…
UCSD: Passing multiple arguments to start-job while using the Cisco PowerShell Agent
While the Cisco PowerShell Agent (PSA) that can be used in UCS Director isn’t exactly perfect, it can still be put to good use. As long as you now how to use it properly 😉 The major issue with using the PSA is that it doesn’t stick around to see if the commands/script was successful or not. As long as it delivered the commands successfully, it’s happy and your workflow will continue to the next step. Jon Hildebrand describes a nice way around this in one of his blog posts: http://snoopj.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/cisco-powershell-agent-service-and-vmware-vum-powercli/ Using his approach, I was able get the PSA to stick around until the job finishes. However, I ran into a challenge when I wanted to pass multiple arguments to start-job. The solution I came up with was declaring the UCSD inputs I wanted to use as powershell variables in the script, before calling the start-job cmdlet. So the commands/script input…
PowerCLI: Function for listing snapshots
My very first PowerCLI related post was about this same topic: listing snapshot info using PowerCLI. In my original post (which you can see here) I only wrote a pretty simple one-liner. Which was kind of okay, but it was missing one crucial thing: who took the snapshot? Why vmware hasn’t found a way to include a username in the get-snapshot cmdlet is something I just can’t understand. There’s really not much code needed to add this to the output, and there’s several ways of doing so. I found that using Get-Snapshot and Get-VIEvent together was the easiest way to get all the info I want. It’s not a perfect solution, seeing as I really wanted to make use of the much faster Get-View instead of Get-Snapshot, but I have yet to figure out a good way to handle snapshot trees using Get-View. As usual I created a function for…
PowerCLI: Evacuating a datastore
In case you ever need to empty out a datastore in you vmware environment, there is a nice little one-liner in PowerCLI for that: Get-VM -Datastore “datastore1″ | Move-VM -Datastore (Get-VMHost -Location ‘cluster1’ | Select-Object -First 1 | Get-Datastore | Where-Object {($_.Name -ne ‘datastore1’) -and ($_.FreeSpaceGB -gt ‘500’)} | Sort-Object FreeSpaceGB -Descending | Select-Object -First 1) Where “datastore1” is the datastore you want to empty out and “cluster1” is the cluster where the datastore is available. The command will move VMs from datastore1 to the datastore in cluster1 with the most available space (minimum 500GB)
PowerCLI: Getting vmhost uptime
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) – ($_.runtime).BootTime).TotalDays).Tostring()).Substring(0,5)}} However, I wasn’t completely satisfied by the the output or the ease of use. So today I went back and rewrote the code and made a function of it. Instead of using the ToString and Substring methods I went for the built-in class Math, which has a method called Round. You can learn more about the Math class here: http://www.madwithpowershell.com/2013/10/math-in-powershell.html Anyways, here’s the function I came up with: function Get-VMHostUptime { [CmdletBinding()] Param ( [Parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$True,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$True)][Alias(‘Name’)][string]$VMHosts, [string]$Cluster ) Process{ If ($VMHosts) { foreach ($VMHost in $VMHosts) {Get-View -ViewType hostsystem -Property name,runtime.boottime -Filter @{“name” = “$VMHost”} | Select-Object Name, @{N=”UptimeDays”; E={[math]::round((((Get-Date) – ($_.Runtime.BootTime)).TotalDays),1)}}, @{N=”UptimeHours”; E={[math]::round((((Get-Date) – ($_.Runtime.BootTime)).TotalHours),1)}}, @{N=”UptimeMinutes”; E={[math]::round((((Get-Date) – ($_.Runtime.BootTime)).TotalMinutes),1)}}} }…
PowerCLI: Getting the status of vmware tools on all VMs
I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you guys why VMware tools is a good idea to have installed on your VMs, and probably not why it’s a good idea to keep VMware tools updated. However, I haven’t found a good way to get a neat list of which VMs need to have their VMware tools upgraded. While working on my vCenter health check script I found that I had to make my own little script to get that list. And, in addition, I wanted the list to include the VM version. I ended up with creating a function to provide me with that list: function Get-VMToolsStatus { [CmdletBinding()] Param ( [ValidateSet(‘NeedUpgrade’,’NotInstalled’,’Unsupported’)][string]$Filter ) $VMs = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine -Property name,guest,config.version,runtime.PowerState $report = @() $progress = 1 foreach ($VM in $VMs) { Write-Progress -Activity “Checking vmware tools status” -Status “Working on $($VM.Name)” -PercentComplete ($progress/$VMs.count*100) -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue $object = New-Object PSObject…