In trying to get used to ESXi and it’s console-less nature I’ve been forcing myself to use the vCLI or PowerCLI to do things. Along the way I’ve learned that the vCLI is generally really well though out, if different. Here is an example of this: Setting up a vNetwork Standard Switch (vSwitch) using PowerCLI and the vCLI:

PowerCLI

Steps:
1. Connect to the ESXi or vCenter server:
   Get-Credential | Connect-VIServer –Server 1.2.3.4
2. Create the new vSwitch:
   Get-VMHost –Name “ESX Host” | New-VirtualSwitch –Name “NewSwitch”

A very basic example that, no uplinks and the like, but it does show that the action is very straight forward in PowerCLI.

vCLI

This one is actually much much more complicated than the above (not really, but well…)

vicfg-vswitch.pl –add vSwitch1 –server 1.2.3.4 –username root –password yourP4ssword

Conclusion

There you go. Two one liners to add a vSwitch to your ESXi (or ESX) host. Both are simpler than I’d thought. Questions? Comments? Drop a line in the comments or hit me up on Twitter (@cody_bunch)

This came up recently on the VMware Virtualization group on LinkedIn. The question was essentially: “In the event of a host hardware issue, can I VMotion my VMs off the host and send a notification?” The answer is: “Most Certainly!” This can be done by setting up a vSphere vCenter Alarm and corresponding action. Let’s explore:

Fire up the vCenter client. Select the level you want to be alerted from then select “Alarms”:

 
Note, there are quite a few default alarms, one of them may work for you:

For ours, we want something a bit more generic, so right click somewhere in the empty space, and choose “New Alert”:

Fill in the details with something that makes sense for your environment. I went with “Generic Host Health Alert”. Make sure to select “Hosts” and the second radio button. Done? Then we’re ready to move on to the “Triggers” tab.

Select Add, then “Hardware Health Changed”, then change the “Status”. I went with “Alert”, like this:

Got that so far? Awesome! Next we move onto the actions:

For this you will configure the “Send a notification email” to an address of your choice. Then you’ll add “Enter maintenance mode”

And with that, select “OK”. You’ve now configured your vSphere vCenter to notify you of a hardware failure, and to migrate your VMs to another host. Note: This will only work if you have clustered hosts, and then only within the capacity of the cluster. Further, depending on the hardware issue, VMotion may not be an option, and you are then dependant on VMware HA. If this was helpful or you have any questions, drop us a line in the comments.

While all of PowerCLI is remarkable in both it’s power and ease of use, there are some cmdlets that do not get as much airtime as they deserve. One of those, is Invoke-VMScript. From Get-Help InvokeVMScript

NAME
    Invoke-VMScript

SYNOPSIS
    Executes the specified PowerShell script in the guest OS of each of the specified virtual machines.

SYNTAX
    Invoke-VMScript [-ScriptText] <String> [-VM] <VirtualMachine[]> [-HostCredential <PSCredential>] [-HostUser <String>] [-HostPassword <SecureString>] [-GuestCredential <PSCredential>] [-GuestUser <String>] [-GuestPassword <SecureString>] [-ToolsWaitSecs <Int32>] [-Server <VIServer[]>] [-WhatIf] [-Confirm] [<CommonParameters>]

DETAILED DESCRIPTION
    Executes the specified PowerShell script in the guest OS of each of the specified virtual machines. The virtual machines must be powered on and have PowerShell and VM Tools installed. In order to authenticate with the host or the guest OS, one of the HostUser/HostPassword (GuestUser/GuestPassword) pair and HostCredential (GuestCredential) parameters must be provided.

Take a close look at the synopsis line, in fact, read it again. I’ll wait. Done? Good. Invoke-VMScript executes a specified PowerShell script INSIDE the guest OS. Starting to feel the power? No? Fine, how bout a use case? It’s yearly inventory time. You know… that time. Your boss wants a list of all VM Names, build numbers, serials, versions, and some other random things. Now, one of two things happens, either you procrastinate and then need to extend your deadline so you can log into every box, OR you use the following one-liner:

get-vm | select -first 1 | %{ $_.Name; $_ | Invoke-VMScript -GuestUser "adminUser" -GuestPassword "urPass" -ScriptText "get-wmiobjectwin32_operatingsystem" -HostUser "root" -hostpassword "rootPass" }

That one liner (yes it is all one line) works kinda like this: Get a list of all my VMs, select the first one, then give me the name, and the output of get-wmiobjectwin32_operatingsystem. In turn, it produces the following output:

web.professionalvmware.com

SystemDirectory : C:\WINDOWS\system32
Organization    : ProfessionalVMware
BuildNumber     : 3790
RegisteredUser  : ProfessionalVMware
SerialNumber    : Your Serial Number here
Version         : 5.2.3790

Not convinced of Invoke-VMScript’s World Dominatingly Awesome Power? Well, let me know in the comments.

Today I needed to disable the VMware tools/console copy & paste functionality… on a lot of VMs (well… more than one is a lot). In doing this, I came across these directions from vmzare:

How To disable copy and paste operations between the guest operating system and remote console ?

1. Log on to the VI Client and select the virtual machine from the inventory panel.
2. The configuration page for this virtual machine appears with the Summary tab displayed.
3. Click Edit Settings.
4. Click Options > Advanced > Configuration Parameters to open the Configuration
5. Parameters dialog box.
6. Click the Add button

Type the following values in the Name field Value column.

Name Field Value Field
isolation.tools.copy.enable false
isolation.tools.paste.enable false
isolation.tools.setGUIOptions.enable false

And they worked awesomely too. However to do this for more than a single VM, I needed a different plan of attack. Knowing I already had most of the script written from my set-keydelay.ps1 post. In fact, I only needed to change a few lines for this one, lovingly titled disable-copypasta.ps1:

Like set-keydelay, this will take a VM object from the pipeline, and apply our config settings. Note, the VM will likely need a reboot before the settings completely take effect. Hope this has been useful. If you have questions, drop a line in the comments, or on twitter @cody_bunch

Note: Edited to include an updated, working Disable-CopyPasta.ps1

While searching for some snippets of VMware PowerCLI code earlier in the week I came across some awesome resources, both resources I’ve not seen/used before, as well as those that I’ve used, but have not linked prior. Note, that most of these are just the PowerCLI section of an equally awesome blog.

• VMware PowerCLI Community
• Get-Admin’s PowerCLI Section
• Peeters Online, PowerCLI Section
• Virtu-Al – PowerCLI Everything!
• Hal Rottenberg’s Blog – The man wrote the book on PowerCLI & VMware. Really.
• LucD’s Blog – Luc is a PowerCLI God… really
• ICT-Freak.NL – Some awesome examples, snippets, etc
• Eric Sloof’s PowerShell Section – Just as good as the rest
• vinternals PowerCLI Mastery
• Carter Shanklin’s PowerCLI Blog @ VMware
• vCritical’s PowerCLI Section

I just received my copy of Steve Jin’s “VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere ”,

As I tech edited the book I’ll not post a long review, other than to say that the book is a good resource, and overall a good book. If you are, or will be programming using the VI or vSphere SDK’s, you’ll want to start here.

From Amazon:

Jin walks you through using the VI SDK and cloud-computing vSphere SDK to manage ESX servers, ESX clusters, and VirtualCenter servers in any environment–no matter how complex. Drawing on his extensive expertise working with VMware strategic partners and enterprise customers, he places the VI SDK in practical context, presenting realistic samples and proven best practices for building robust, effective solutions. Jin demonstrates how to manage every facet of a VMware environment, including inventory, host systems, virtual machines (VMs), snapshots, VMotion, clusters, resource pools, networking, storage, data stores, events, alarms, users, security, licenses, and scheduled tasks.

I told you it was the big feature didn’t I” While I’m a PowerShell man at heart, there is something to be said, for having a cross platform, potentially hypervisor agnostic scripting engine, that is tied not just into your virtual infrastructure, but also into your management platform.

Take a look at a few of the examples from the BlueBear site:

No, that isn’t selectable. At least not from here, but you can copy/paste it from the BlueBear site linked above. Enjoy!

While great, managing events with the the VI Client can be a pain. No search functionality, old events fall off the list, etc, etc. So what is an admin to do?

A resourceful admin will have been playing with the VI Toolkit, and would have found the get-vievent cmdlet. Let’s take a look at how we can manage VI Events using this cmdlet in a few different scenarios:

First lets see what this cmdlet can do for us:

Cool! So here I point out a limitation of the cmdlet (or VI, or both) It will only return 1000 events, that’s it:

PS C:\> get-vievent -MaxSamples 1000 | Measure-Object

Count    : 1000
PS C:\> get-vievent -MaxSamples 1350 | Measure-Object

Count    : 1000
That doesn’t make sense does it? Not sure if it’s a bug or not, but with some of the other filters, you can really dig into your events without having to get more than the first thousand.

Lets take a look at how to get a list of the first 3 errors for my VI specifically:

get-vievent -MaxSamples 3 -types error

Cool? Lets take a look at what this looks like… if I wanted the first 3 events on a particular host:

PS C:\> get-vievent -MaxSamples 3 -Entity (get-vmhost|select -First 1)

Let’s combine that, and the start & finish switches, to get 3 error events from our ESX server, from last Tuesday to last Thursday:

PS C:\> get-vievent -MaxSamples 3 -Start 01/13/2009 -Finish 01/15/2009 -Entity (get-vmhost | select -First 1)

So, even with the 1000 event limitation, it’s still a pretty powerful cmdlet, no?

Questions? Leave them in the comments.

Because there is an answer for everything and for everything that answer is PowerShell. Sometimes in your Virtual Infrastructure, you will have a need to answer a question or two. Normally these questions are put to you by vCenter: “Did you copy or move this VM?”, “Is today your birthday?”, “Who shot Kennedy?”.

For Example:

So I had to stage this screenshot, but it’s something that will happen when you have VMs that have the same UUID in your vCenter. Straight forward, no? The right answer in this case, since I have two of these VMs is to “Create”. Two clicks, done.

What if you had to do this for 300 VMs? A bit more cumbersome then. 300 * 3 = 900 clicks (Changing VMs is a click too) and then heavens forbid you miss, and have duplicate UUIDs out there.

So, how do we do this in my automation tool of choice: PowerShell? First we take a look around… Courtsy of Mr Rottenberg:

PS > $a = Get-VM myvm | Get-View

PS > $a | gm *answer*

   TypeName: VMware.Vim.VirtualMachine

Name     MemberType Definition

----     ---------- ----------

AnswerVM Method     System.Void AnswerVM(String questionId, String answerChoice)

Cool, so how do we get the questionID? We search a bit, and find “QuestionInfo”

PS C:\> $ans.Runtime.Question

Id              : 0
Text            : msg.uuid.moved:The location of this virtual machine's configu
                  ration file has changed since it was last powered on.

                  If the virtual machine has been copied, you should create a n
                  ew unique identifier (UUID).  If it has been moved, you shoul
                  d keep its old identifier.

                  If you are not sure, create a new identifier.

                  What do you want to do?
Choice          : VMware.Vim.ChoiceOption
Message         :
DynamicType     :
DynamicProperty :

Cool… Getting closer. Choice Option? Digging deeper:

PS C:\> $ans.Runtime.Question.Choice.ChoiceInfo

Key             : 1
Label           : Create
Summary         : Create
DynamicType     :
DynamicProperty :

Key             : 2
Label           : Keep
Summary         : Keep
DynamicType     :
DynamicProperty :

Key             : 3
Label           : Always Create
Summary         : Always Create
DynamicType     :
DynamicProperty :

Key             : 4
Label           : Always Keep
Summary         : Always Keep
DynamicType     :
DynamicProperty :

Key             : 0
Label           : Cancel
Summary         : Cancel
DynamicType     :
DynamicProperty :

Looks like we now have enough to work with… So lets answer that question:

PS C:\> $ans.AnswerVM(0,1)

And with that the VM powered on. Building this into a larger script will be left as an exercise for the reader. What, don’t like to exercise? Fine, post a comment.

These slides look to have been released after last years VMworld, and provide a great introduction to scripting and automation with the VMware tools.

Link!

The labs will help you get started with scripting VMware Infrastructure to enable automation, extensibility, and integration with existing tools. When we ran this at VMworld, we had about 600 attendees and it was so popular some students camped out in line to attend the lab a second time. We had so many folks request a way to share this with their teams that we decided to publish the whole thing for the community.

The lab is available in two versions: one shows how to use the VI Perl Toolkit and the other shows how to use the PowerShell-based VI Toolkit (for Windows). The attached files contain the manuals for both versions of the lab and the exercises for both versions of the lab.

The lab takes 2-3 hours to complete (not including the time to set the environment up first), but is conveniently split into 20 minute exercises. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of VMware Infrastructure, resources for using the toolkits, and a variety of useful scripts for performing common administrative tasks. The exercises cover triggering tasks, examining VM attributes, performing actions on VMs, and exporting performance data