During the initial stages of an upgrade of a number of VMware hosts from ESX 3.5 U5 to ESXi 4.0 U2 the boot times rose from the normal few mins (most of which is Dell Hardware checks) to around 12 mins.
In particular it was appearing to hang for 5 mins, whilst on the screen the below was displayed:
Loading module multiextent
This would only happen after the install was completed and the host connected back to the fibre channel SAN, otherwise boot times were normal.
I was asked recently via Twitter how to find the CpuFeatureMask property of a VM using PowerCLI. When running a basic
Get-VM Test01 the below properties are outputted to the console:
It is possible to view more properties and values by runnning:
Get-VM Test01 | Format-List \* Unfortunately this still does not reveal the CpuFeatureMask property. However, if we pipe the Get-VM command through to Get-View we will get back a .
I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I’ve been using VMware Update Manager a lot recently - and wrote about some of my experiences here. Today I was really pleased to see that Carter Shanklin’s team released some cmdlets for PowerCLI to cover Update Manager which had only previously been available back as a beta in the VI Toolkit days.
They arrived just in time because I am currently preparing for a round of ESX patching and I needed to provide a report of hotfixes I was intending to deploy for a particular version of ESX.
A while back I posted a script on a basic capacity report I run each month to get an overview of CPU and Memory usage in our various clusters. Since upgrading to vSphere 4.0 U1 I noticed some strange behavior in the results for memory, i.e. they came back at pretty close to 0% (typically between 0.05 and 0.06%) for the average memory usage in a cluster which typically were quite heavily used.
After my PowerCLI session at yesterday’s London VMUG a few people asked me for the content. I believe the content from all sessions will soon be posted to http://www.box.net/londonug, but in the meantime you can get my slides from the below link.
PowerCLI Workshop London VMUG.pptx
Thanks to all who chatted to me afterwards, its always nice to know that someone got something out of a session you put on.
I recieved a preview copy of the vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide a few weeks back from my good friend and PowerCLI expert Alan Renouf . It is a great read and because of its size is really handy fo carrying around and referring to without needing to lug a 700 page book around with you. (Having said that I do currently have Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere in my bag at the moment!
I have been lucky enough to be invited to run a PowerCLI pre-show workshop before the main event of the next London VMUG on 24th November. A couple of VMUG’s back Alan Renouf ran a similar session on how to get started with PowerCLI. I thought this time I would move things one step on so the kind of topics I am likely to cover are reporting scripts and how you can make practical use of them, oneliners to get you great information and take a look at the VESI.