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The PowerWF family of products are easy enough for desktop and departmental automation, yet powerful and scalable enough for the Data Center. PowerWF compliments Opalis and other RBA solutions, lets you leverage your workforce and preserves your investment as your automation needs grow.
Alan Renouf has a new video that shows how to use the new PowerCLI cmdlets for vCloud director.
- 4 months agoJonathan 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.
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.
Jonathan Medd has a new post that shows how to insure that all Windows Services that are set to Automatic, are actually running.
I needed to […] check that all of the Windows Services set to Automatic successfully started after the reboot.
This should be pretty straightforward since we have a Get-Servicecmdlet. Unfortunately however, this cmdlet does not return a StartMode parameter, i.e. it’s not possible to tell whether the Startup Type has been set to Automatic, Manual or Disabled. This is quite a large gap in my opinon – if you agree with me you can vote to get it included in a future release here. Of course with PowerShell there’s usually another way to achieve the same objective and using Get-WMIObject it is possible to find out the Startup Type of the service.
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.
Tony Redmond at WindowsITPro has a new post on the future on Exchange administration. Not surprisingly, PowerShell is at the heart of his discussion.
Product Note: If you are not comfortable writing scripts, don’t forget that you can use PowerWF to take full advantage of Exchange PowerShell integration without getting lost in scripts.
- Microsoft is heading towards a world of automated management based on PowerShell in Windows Server 8
- Exchange 2010 is close to where Microsoft wants to go because it already uses web-based consoles and Remote PowerShell
- The trend will continue, but will administrators heed the clarion call?
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.
PowerWF has been providing a workflow orchestration layer to PowerShell for 3 years now.
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.
WindowsAzure.com has a nice primer on using PowerShell with Windows Azure Node.js.
What Is Windows Azure PowerShell for Node.js
Windows Azure PowerShell for Node.js provides a command-line environment for developing and deploying Node applications for Windows Azure through a few Windows PowerShell cmdlets.
The following tasks are supported:
- Import publishing settings to enable you to deploy services in Windows Azure.
- Generate configuration files and a sample application for a Node hosted service. Create a Windows Azure service that contains web roles and worker roles.
- Test your service locally using the Windows Azure compute emulator.
- Deploy your service to the Windows Azure staging or production environment.
- Scale and update services in Windows Azure.
- Enable and disable remote access to service role instances.
- Start, stop, and remove services.
If you are using Azure, this is worth a read.
If you are authoring your own PowerShell modules using PowerSE or PowerWF, you should check out this post on Module Installation Best Practices by PowerShell MVP Oisin Grehan.
I’m seeing a few errant companies have their installers throw their modules into ${env:systemroot}\WindowsPowerShell\1.0\Modules but this is not the right place. The only things that should go there are core operating system modules from Microsoft. So, where should you install them?
Mike Pfeiffer has a nice write up on querying a list of conference rooms in Exchange 2010 using PowerShell.
If you work in an campus type of environment, where you have conference rooms spread out across multiple buildings or physical sites, you may have heard of the Room Finder functionality introduced with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010. The Room Finder allows users to easily locate a room resource when scheduling a meeting in Outlook. Instead of users having to scroll through the Global Address List (GAL) or try to guess which room resources are located in a particular location, they can select the appropriate room list, and see all of the available rooms.
Room lists are essentially just a special type of Distribution Group in Exchange. To populate the room list, you simply add one or more resource mailboxes to the group. After you’ve defined several room lists, you’ll probably get to the point where you need to generate a report listing all of the room lists and their associated resource mailboxes. The key to generating a report is to simply query the members of each distribution group that are designated as a room list.
PowerWF ships with a number of sample workflows to provide value right out of the box. Under the Windows Admin section, there are several workflows that analyze your Windows Updates.
These workflows all display their results in a webbrowser control, but you could easily have the workflows email you the results instead.
Obviously, the first 3 are brute force workflows, used to verify which windows updates are installed. The Get All Windows Updates can be used to verify that a specific update was applied and to make sure that if an update shows up as Failed that it later installed correctly.
The second set of workflows could easily be turned into a weekly or monthly report that is emailed to an administrator, especially the Last 10 Failed Windows Update.
Of course any of these workflows can be easily changed to do things like:
