vmware

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....

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....

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

Robert van den Nieuwendijk has a nice post on how to use PowerCLI to find VMs that need consolidation and then how to start consolidation. You can that post here: http://rvdnieuwendijk.com/2012/09/26/use-powercli-to-consolidate-snapshots-in-vsphere-5/ But, as always, I prefer to make a function of these kind of things. A function is much easier to remember than a bunch of parameters and cmdlets. So here’s the code for a function that will search through the vCentre for VMs that need disk consolidation:...