Posts Tagged ‘ storage ’

Google Drive to be available shortly?

After reading the rumors on TechCrunch, I was really happy to see that Google finally decided to start the competition with Dropbox. It’s not that I don’t like dropbox, in-fact I really love it, but I have all my current services (Google Apps) at Google and some documents at Dropbox while I actually prefer to have everything stored on one place.

Anyway, it just seems a matter of time until Google will change Google Docs to Google Drive, because that’s what they appear to be doing. They already seem to have implemented some of the Google Drive stuff into the current Google Docs page which you can make visible if you want and you know your way around in the Web Developer tools in Chrome. Which will look like this:

The only problem is the method described on the Gemind.com.br-blog doesn’t work anymore because Google appeared to have changed the way they store the configuration. It’s now stored in an Array.

So, in short, to make the Google Drive options visible you have to use the following code:

config['ed'] = true; config['ddu'] = true;

Instead of:

config.ed = true; config.ddu = '.';

That’s all! The method hasn’t changed, except for the code to use. Now it’s just a matter of time before Google will officially announce the Google Drive feature. I’m curious if they will also provide client-side sync software like Dropbox does.

2011
11/06
CATEGORY
Blog
Cloud
Google
Google Drive
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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!
–

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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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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Refresh Datastores with PowerShell

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:

image

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”.

2009
07/22
CATEGORY
ESX
PowerShell
storage
vCenter
VMware
vSphere
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List NFS Datastore Usage

Some time ago someone we agreed on putting a minimum of 15 Virtual Machines on each NFS-volume on our NetApp storage. Now, almost a year later we have about 14 NFS volumes and the spreading of the VM’s on the Volumes have become a bit out of the ordinary. Mostly because we didn’t have an easy overview of how many VM’s there are present on each volume or because VM’s needed to be created on a short notice.

Since I’ve been busy with PowerShell I decided to create a nice script/utility to create this overview and to increase our insight in our NFS volumes. At first I made a console script, but soon -while I was discovering the posibilities of PowerShell- I created a GUI for it using PrimalForms.

List NFS Store Usage - Example Output

List NFS Store Usage - Example Output

The source is no rocket science, but I just found the utility very handy/helpful to monitor our storage environment for VMware. If you intend to use this sourcecode, don’t forget to adjust the VirtualCenter hostname and access credentials. Also, the names of our DataStores are all start with “VMWare_NFSxx” and I have a condition running to check if the DataStore name starts with that. You might want to adjust that to your datastore name convention.

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2009
05/26
CATEGORY
ESX
PowerShell
vCenter
VMware
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