All about VMware, NetApp, PowerShell, Windows, Microsoft and Linux in general.

Just a small oneliner to display all the servers, their overall status, CPU and Memory usage in all your Datacenters (can be handy if you have multiple datacenters).

Get-Datacenter | Sort | Get-VMHost | Sort | Get-View |`
Select Name, OverallStatus, `
@{N="CPU Usage (GHz)";E={[math]::round(
$_.Summary.QuickStats.OverallCpuUsage/1024,2)}}, `
@{N="Memory Usage (GB)";E={[math]::round(
$_.Summary.QuickStats.OverallMemoryUsage/1024,2)}} 

And it will give you an output that looks like this:

You may not find it very useful like this, but you can also add a Where statement to this line to filter on several things. For example, you can decide you only want to see the servers that have yellow or red Overall Status due to high memory or CPU usage:

Get-Datacenter | Sort | Get-VMHost | Sort | Get-View | `
Select Name, OverallStatus, `
@{N="CPU Usage (GHz)";E={[math]::round(
$_.Summary.QuickStats.OverallCpuUsage/1024,2)}}, `
@{N="Memory Usage (GB)";E={[math]::round(
$_.Summary.QuickStats.OverallMemoryUsage/1024,2)}} | `
Where { $_.OverallStatus -ne "green" }

Which will give you something like this:

Ofcourse these onliners are cool and handy to use, but you can also use these oneliners to write a script around it to monitor your servers. I will post a script like that soon to show you different interpretations of this script.

It’s not hard to create a PowerShell script to list your current snapshots, but of course it’s a nice challenge to create a oneliner that’ll take care of this.

I’ve created several oneliners with different output, for instance: this one is to show snapshots of your total VMware infrastructure:

Get-VM | Sort Name | Get-Snapshot | Where { $_.Name.Length -gt 0 } | Select
VM,Name,Description,Created

While in fact in the organisation I work for we have several locations throughout the country and several VMware ESX Servers running on each one which we’ve divided in different Datacenters in our VMware Infrastructure.

So for instance you can also use the following line to list all Snapshots in a specific Datacenter:

Get-Datacenter -Name "Your Datacenter" | Get-VM | Sort Name | Get-Snapshot | 
Where { $_.Name.Length -gt 0 } | Select VM,Name,Description,Created

Or just for one specific cluster:

Get-Cluster "Cluster Name" | Get-VM | Sort Name | Get-Snapshot | Where
{ $_.Name.Length -gt 0 } | Select VM,Name,Description,Created

All of these oneliners give somewhat the same output, which looks like this (company sensitive names are sensored, sorry )

You can also add several other cmdlets to change the output of the result data, such as  ConvertTo-HTML or Out-GridView (if you use PowerShell 2.0 already).

When using NFS for your datastores on your SAN (eg. NetApp) and you resize your datastore on the fly it always takes a while before the ESX/vSphere servers refresh the datastore so you can see the new size of the volume.

This can be annoying when you want to create a VM on one of these volumes and ESX still thinks the volume is too small because it hasn’t refreshed it’s datastores yet. Normally I would pick one ESX server where I want to put the VM on for starters and refresh the NFS volume which I want to use:

Ofcourse I wanted to make it easier for myself so I wrote a little PowerShell script to refresh the datastores on all ESX Servers in our Cluster. I think it’s also possible to make a oneliner out of this and I will try to create one and if I succeed I’ll post it again

$vcHost = "virtual.center.host"
$vcClusterName = "Your ClusterName"
$vcUser = "username"
$vcPass = "password"

$vcServer = Connect-VIServer -Server:$vcHost -User:$vcUser -Password:$vcPass -WarningAction:SilentlyContinue

$vmHosts = Get-Datacenter | Get-Cluster -Name:$vcClusterName | Get-VMHost | Sort

ForEach ($vmHost in $vmHosts) {
    If (Get-VMHostStorage -VMHost:$vmHost -Refresh -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue -WarningAction:SilentlyContinue) {
        Write-Host $vmHost.Name," host storage information refreshed"
    } else {
        Write-Host $vmHost.Name," host storage refresh failed!"
    }
}

Disconnect-VIServer -Server:$vcServer -Confirm:$false

After the script has been running the datastores on all your ESX-servers in the cluster will be refreshed so all resizes  of your NFS volumes on your SAN will be visible and “active”.

Here’s a useful tip for anyone who enjoys the handy debugger in the PowerGUI Script Editor during their intensive PowerShell scripting activities

The most useful feature while debugging is the “Variables” window in the editor.

It allows you to see all the variables/objects that you declared and look inside them to see what data they contain.

The only problem is if you work in a script, making a lot of changes in the process, the Variables window will keep on filling up with all the variables that are used in the scripts even though some variables are not even used anymore.

This causes a mess in the Variables window so you kind of lose track of the things that actually matter and are worth keeping an eye on. So, I went looking in the Options (menu Tools > Options) and I found an option that resets the debug/variables windows (Runspace) every time you start a new debugging session. 
 
Simply select the “Reset PowerShell runspace each time debugging is started.” option, press OK and you will have a nice and tidy runspace (variables/debug window) from now on.

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to my first blog post on my own blog page. This finally gives me the opportunity to write a bit more and add a bit more imagery than I can do on just Twitter. Now that being said, let’s get to where this post is about

Microsoft finally release the first Beta of Visual Studio 2010. Now I’m not a fulltime developer, but I enjoy to develop a thing or two every now and then. Besides that I really love to see what’s new in new versions.
So I downloaded the ISO-image from Microsoft’s MSDN and I started instaling it on my Windows 7 RC installation. The installation is no other than 2008 except the only difference is that it starts installing the Beta version of the .NET 4.0 Framework which I suppose should offer a bit more features than 3.5 did.

After the installation -and the inevitable reboot- I ran Visual Studio 2010 and configured the environment for Visual C# usage, simply because that’s the language I’ll be developing in

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