function

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....

For almost a year ago, I posted a simple one-liner to list all VMs who has ISOs mounted. You can view that post here: http://cloud.kemta.net/2013/10/powershell-vmware-list-all-vms-with-iso-mounted-and-dismount-them/ That post was written before I truly discovered the major advantages of using Get-View instead of Get-VM, Get-VMHost and so on. If used correctly, there’s a major difference in speed when using Get-View over Get-VM. When writing this post I checked the differences in speed when using the old way that I linked to above and my new function (which I’ll get to in a second or two....

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 = $VMs | Where-Object {$_....

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....

To find out to which vm a MAC address belongs, you can use a simple one-liner: Get-vm | Select Name, @{N=“Network“;E={$_ | Get-networkAdapter | ? {$_.macaddress -eq“00:50:56:A4:22:F4“}}} |Where {$_.Network-ne “”} (Courtesy of this page: http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/07/07/powercli-more-one-liner-power/ ) Thats really great, and you can easily extend the one-liner to include more data if you like. But for someone who isn’t comfortable with using PowerCLI yet, it can seem a bit terrifying. Therefore I usually create functions for long one-liners like this one....