Exporting a Hyper-V virtual machine using PowerShell

I know I’m a little VMware-centric when it comes to PowerShell and virtualization. This shouldn’t be too surprising with the features of PowerCLI combined with our PowerVI VMware tool.  

I thought I would venture off that path with a blog post I found by Ben Armstrong that explains how to export a Hyper-V virtual machine using PowerShell -

I need to automate the process of exporting a virtual machine recently – and when I checked around I found that while there are a number of sample scripts out there that show you how to do this (some even on this blog) they are all written in VBScript.  As I am now to the stage where PowerShell is my preferred scripting language – I sat down and wrote up this short script:

(read more and get script)

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

Disabling a View Pool with PowerCLI

Rob Daniels at ClearPath Solutions Group has an interesting post on disabling a view pool for VMware.  He points out that there isn’t currently a PowerCLI command to do it, but came up with a PowerShell solution anyway.

Have you ever wanted to disable a VDI pool from the command line, but couldn’t find the right command for the job? As simple as it may seem to do, VMware has yet to equip the PowerCLI Snap-in with a “disable-pool” commandlet. Some may try to accommodate this by simply removing pool entitlements, but you can be faced with the following error:

Remove-PoolEntitlement : PowershellService::RemovePoolEntitlement FAILED, 

error=User with sid  has an active VDI Session on Pool . Entitlement cannot be 

removed until this session is terminated.
 

This error is the result of an active desktop session attached to the entitlement being removed, or worse, anywhere within the VDI system as this is a global property. What this means is that if a user has an entitlement to more than one pool, this command may fail every time. As a work-around, there is a value within the local ADAM database on the View broker server. It is a Boolean value with the name “pae-Disabled” and can be found in the vdi.vmware.int\Applications\ attribute of the local LDAP. Below is an example of how this value can be toggled from a script:

(read more and get script)

• #PowerShell
• #PowerCLI
• #VMware
• #vsphere
• #PowerWF
• #PowerVI
• #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

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

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

How to Change ESX Host Root Password

Did you know that PowerVI includes a PowerShell script that lets you change the root password on multiple ESX host at one time.  This is useful if you have a policy to change the passwords regularly, but want to keep the password the same across all hosts.

To change the password -

1. Make sure PowerVI is installed.
2. Open the vSphere client and connect to your vCenter
3. Select all of the ESX Hosts that need to have their root password changed
4. Right click and select “Set Host Root Password”
   
5. PowerVI will launch a dialog that lets you specify the old password and set the new password.
   
6. PowerVI will show you the progress as it changes the password for each of the selected hosts.

• #powershell
• #powercli
• #powervi
• #vsphere
• #vmware

Blog Short: Bored Wookie on PowerCLI

The Bored Wookie has a basic introduction to PowerCLI for VMware automation.  Even if you already have a basic understanding of PowerShell and PowerCLI, you should click through just to see the blogs title bar.

• #powershell
• #powercli
• #powervi

Give Your $.02 on PowerCLI

VMware is in the process of extending PowerCLI capabilities to automate vCloud Director, and they want your feedback (assuming you currently use PowerCLI).

As announced at VMworld 2011, we are currently in the process of extending the PowerCLI capabilities to automate vCloud Director (vCD) configuration, as part of this we would like to focus the users of PowerCLI and vCloud Director and allow you to have your say.

To do this we have put together 4 simple questions to get your feedback.

Please select the option that best fits your desired user experience for each of the questions.

To thank you for filling in this survey, we will select one of you at random to take the PowerCLI training course online on the TrainSignal website.

(read more)

• #powercli
• #powershell
• #vmware
• #vsphere

Using New-VIProperty to get VM Tools Version

Alan Renouf has a new blog post up that takes advantage of the New-VIProperty cmdlet to add the VMware tools version to the get-vm cmdlet.  you may recall that Luc Dekens had a rather extensive post a while back that talked about many cool things you could do using the New-VIProperty cmdlet.

Here’s Alan’s use case…

If we look at the  object which gets returned back when we use the Get-VM cmdlet you will see […] the returned object doesn’t have a root property for ToolsVersion or ToolsVersionStatus, for this we need to delve into the ExtensionData property and have a look around, once we have found the information it is fairly easy to add these to our object using the New-VIProperty cmdlet as below:

New-VIProperty -Name ToolsVersion -ObjectType VirtualMachine `
    -ValueFromExtensionProperty ‘Config.tools.ToolsVersion’ `
    -Force

New-VIProperty -Name ToolsVersionStatus -ObjectType VirtualMachine `
    -ValueFromExtensionProperty ‘Guest.ToolsVersionStatus’ `
    -Force

Now we have added these as a new property to our object (actually they are PowerShell Code Properties), we can use our old friend Get-VM to retrieve the information easily:

Get-VM | Select Name, Version, ToolsVersion, ToolsVersionStatus

(read more)

It looks like Alan’s use case looks like it may already be covered, but I figured I would post the information anyway.

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