PowerShell Scheduling

Jeffery Hicks is working on a PowerShell scheduler that looks pretty promising.

Today’s Friday Fun is a continuation of my exploration of ways to use Start-Job. A few weeks ago I wrote about using Start-Job to create “scheduled” tasks. I realized I could take this further and turn this into a sort of alarm clock. The goal is to execute at command at a given time, but I wanted to make it easy to specify the time. What I have so far is a function called New-Alarm. I have some other ideas and hope to expand this into a module, but for now I thought I’d toss this out to you and get some feedback.

(read more)

By the way, if you are using PowerWF, it includes an agent that makes it easy to schedule your PowerShell scripts or workflows to run an a specific schedule (Every so many minutes, every Wednesday, etc.)

• #PowerShell
• #PowerSE

PowerShell Function Primer

Richard Siddaway at IT Knowledge Exchange answers a very basic question that many new PowerShell scripters run into - Once I create a function, how do I use it.

Most of my scripts end up being functions because I will eventually combine them into modules

My recent script

function get-logedonuser {
param (
 [string]$computername = $env:COMPUTERNAME
)
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_LogonSession -ComputerName $computername |
foreach {
 $data = $_                        

 $id = $data.__RELPATH -replace """", "'"
 $q = "ASSOCIATORS OF {$id} WHERE ResultClass = Win32_Account"
 Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $computername -Query $q |
 select @{N="User";E={$($_.Caption)}},
 @{N="LogonTime";E={$data.ConvertToDateTime($data.StartTime)}}
}
}

Prompted a comment about how could you run this script.

First off I would save it to a file – get-logedonuser.ps1

You can then either

(read more)

If you are running PowerWF, it is very easy to leverage a function you find on the internet.  Simply paste the function into a script block in the workflow and then either call it from that script block or from elsewhere in your workflow.

• #how to
• #powershell
• #PowerWF

PowerWF v2.7 Released

Devfarm Software, a Windows 8 Launch Partner, today announced the release of version 2.7 of the award winning PowerWF. With this release, PowerWF begins the transition from a popular PowerShell workflow orchestration tool to a complete windows automation platform.

For the past 3 years PowerWF has seamlessly combined Windows PowerShell with Workflow technologies to provide users with PowerShell Orchestration. PowerWF provides a rich automation platform that lets IT Administrators harness the strengths and versatility of Windows PowerShell with a workflow Orchestration layer required to cross technical disciplines.

The latest version of PowerWF provides instant return on investment with one-click automation solutions for many common IT and VMware administrative tasks. The solutions can be run as-is, or easily modified using PowerWF’s visual authoring environment.

“The focus of this release has been jump starting the automation process,” said Ben Vierck, CTO of Devfarm Software. “We want our users to see the value of automation as soon as they launch the product.”

“PowerWF has always provided a powerful authoring environment,” added PowerWF Product Manager Kirk Munro. “This version ensures that users gain the benefits of automation even before exploring PowerWF’s authoring experience.”

PowerWF’s new features include:

•     New Start Page - Immediately run dozens of automation workflows included with the product and leverage the power of Workflow and PowerShell without requiring the technical knowledge behind the automation scripts.
•     Improved Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM) support - Deploy management packs right from the Start Page. Management Packs for SCSM include: automatically close resolved incidents; expire inactive problem announcements; cancel pending activities for closed change requests; identify problems from incident trends; notify incident authors about unresolved incidents; and retrieving SCSM statistics.
•     Improved Toolbox Search - search using command names or keywords.

PowerSE’s new features include:

•     Easier Breakpoint Management - Breakpoints pane shows all breakpoints set in the scripting environment. Manage breakpoints using the breakpoint cmdlets.
•     Breakpoints Preserved Across Sessions - Allows continued debugging of PowerShell scripts from one session to the next, even if the file is closed inside PowerSE.
•     Improved Help Search - search using keywords topic headings. PowerSE includes a keyword search in command descriptions to allow users to discover commands using related terms, such as “vMotion”.

(view press release)

• #press
• #PowerWF
• #PowerSE

VMware Cluster Capacity Check

Jonathan Medd has posted another useful PowerShell/PowerCLI script.  This time he is looking at Cluster storage capacity.

I recently needed to provide a high level capacity overview per VMware cluster looking at some metrics of interest that were being used as a guide to the capacity state of a cluster. Note: these are by no means definitive or the ones you should be using in your environment, but for these purposes they met the requirements. The metrics I looked at per cluster were the ratio of vCPUs to pCPUs, the amount of Effective, Allocated and average Active Memory and the amount of Free Diskspace.

(read more and download script)

As is usually the case, it would be very straight forward to convert this script to a PowerWF workflow or a PowerVI script so that you can run it from your vSphere client.

• #powershell
• #powercli
• #vsphere
• #PowerWF
• #powervi

Monitor Services with PowerShell

It would be fairly straight forward to take the output from Jonathan’s script and create a SCOM management pack using PowerWF’s ToSCOM activity.

• #SCOM
• #PowerWF
• #System Center

PowerShell is key to the Future of Exchange Administration

• #exchange
• #PowerSE
• #PowerWF

Count Running Virtual Machines on Datastores

Found another good candidate for a PowerVI script at vNiklas.djungel.se.

If you are running too many VM´s on your datastores in your vSphere environment you can have some problems, this if your SAN is not VAAI compliant and can handle SCSI locking etc.

Alan Renouf has made a blog post about how to get a report about how many VM´s you have on every datastore, I have extended to only report on running VM´s as these are the interesting number..

(read more)

I would alter his script slightly for use in PowerVI.

#--name Virtual Machines Per Datastore
#--multi --hideoutput
#--origin PowerSE

Get-Datastore | 
	Select Name,@{Name="TotalVMs";Expression={@($_ | 
	Get-VM).Count}}, 
	@{Name="PoweredOnVMs";Expression={@($_ | Get-VM | where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"}).Count}}, 
	@{Name="PoweredOffVMs";Expression={@($_ | Get-VM | where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOff"}).Count}}, 
	@{Name="SuspendedVMs";Expression={@($_ | Get-VM | where {$_.PowerState -eq "Suspended"}).Count}} | 
	Sort Name | 
	out-GridView

• #powershell
• #powercli
• #powervi

PowerShell v3 and Workflow

The Microsoft PowerShell development team is starting to talk about the addition of Workflow to PowerShell v3.  As Hal points out -

A workflow is a sequence of automated steps or activities that execute tasks on or retrieve data from one or more managed nodes (computers or devices). These activities can include individual commands or scripts. Windows PowerShell Workflow enables, IT pros and developers alike, to author sequences of multi-computer management activities — that are either long-running, repeatable, frequent, parallelizable, interruptible, stoppable, or restartable — as workflows. By design, workflows can be resumed from an intentional or accidental suspension or interruption, such as a network outage, a reboot or power loss.

(read more)

PowerWF has been providing a workflow orchestration layer to PowerShell for 3 years now.

• #v3
• #powershell
• #workflow
• #powerwf

Alan Renouf’s Top 5 PowerCLI Scripts

Alan Renouf has posted his top PowerCLI scripts of the week (a couple are from PowerWF friend Luc Dekens).  There are scripts on High Availability, Storage DRS, getting VMware Views, and virtual machine start up scripts.

• #powershell
• #powervi
• #powercli
• #PowerSE
• #powerwf
• #vmware
• #vsphere