Archive for the ‘ NetApp ’ Category

PowerCLI: Unfreeze/Resume Your Virtual Machines

NOTE: I published this article a bit earlier, but due to the fact that this was a not-yet-released feature I removed this post once again. Since this feature is released for a long time already I deciced to re-publish it, enjoy!
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Last night I got a message from our monitoring system that one of our NFS-volumes on our NetApp SAN was almost full but at this particular moment I was driving home and by the time I got home the NFS volume was completely full which resulted in the Virtual Machines freezing up.

After sizing up the NFS volume the machines do not automatically start to ‘unfreeze’ again, and they were waiting for me to answer the question in the vSphere client to “Retry” or “Abort”. Ofcourse I could’ve just answered “Retry” on each machine to get them going again, but I thought it would be nicer to solve this with the almighty PowerCLI since it were like 30 Virtual Machines.

Get-Cluster "Your Cluster" | Get-VM | Sort | Get-VMQuestion | `
Set-VMQuestion -Option "Retry" -Confirm:$false

This will result in answering all machines waiting to continue with the “Retry” option in your cluster (in this example I used “Your Cluster” as clustername).

I hope you won’t be needing it much, but if you do it will be handy ;)

2011
05/17
CATEGORY
ESX
NetApp
PowerCLI
PowerShell
storage
vCenter
VMware
vSphere
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PowerCLI: Reset CD-drives using PowerShell

As most of you know and probably experienced from time to time: when a Virtual Machine’s CD-drive is connected to an ISO-file on one of your Datastores or even connected to the physical drive of your ESX-host the migration due VMotion of a Virtual Machine will not work.

Normally this isn’t really a problem except if you put a ESX-host in Maintenance mode and Virtual Center will simply not tell you why the Maintenance mode process is hanging or even giving a time-out after 15 minutes for no obvious reason. Most of the times it’s a Virtual Machine which has a CD-drive connected to an ISO file. A waste of time if you ask me.

So to prevent this from happening I’ve written a simple PowerShell oneliner/script disconnect these CD-drives from the ISO-files or from the physical drives and set them to Client-drives which is ok for VMotion:

(Get-VM -Location :( Get-VMHost "your.esx.host")) | `
ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | `
Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | `
Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

Instead of executing this just on one host you can also execute this for your entire cluster:

(Get-VM -Location :( Get-Cluster "Your Cluster Name")) | `
ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | `
Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | `
Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

Or ofcourse, by Datacenter:

(Get-VM -Location :( Get-Datacenter "Your Datacenter Name")) | `
ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | `
Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | `
Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

It’s as easy as that, now there will be no Virtual Machine interrupting your VMotions anymore and you can put your ESX hosts in maintenance mode without any problems ;)

Cheers!

2009
08/16
CATEGORY
Linux
NetApp
vCenter
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Refresh Datastores with PowerShell (oneliner)

As I mentioned in the previous article about Refreshing Datastores I would see if I could make a oneliner for this action and I succeed in doing that.

This is what the line should be:

Get-Datacenter | Get-Cluster -Name "ClusterName" | Get-VMHost |
ForEach { $_ } { Get-VMHostStorage -VMHost:$_ -Refresh }

The result on the PowerCLI would probably look like this:

image

The ‘Recent Tasks’ window in the vSphere client will show you a line with “Refresh Host Storage System” for each server.

Thanks for Arne Fokkema for helping me out with the start of the oneliner ;)

Cheers!

NOTE: Get-Datacenter isn’t really required so the oneliner can actually be shorter ;)

2009
07/22
CATEGORY
ESX
NetApp
storage
vCenter
VMware
vSphere
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