What’s Going On? Sometimes companies appear to make seemingly dumb decisions and announcements without realising the true impact of the change they are trying to make. Occasionally, enough thought has gone into such a decision, but more often than not it hasn’t. It’s been well documented over the interwebs the last few weeks that Microsoft has decided to kill off the TechNet subscription. Their argument for doing so is this:

There are quite a few posts out there already on this topic and in fact the official VMware KB article has a suggestion on how you can get CDP info via PowerCLI. I didn’t really like the way they presented the code though so I made my own function Get-VMHostNetworkAdapterCDP in the typical style with pipeline input and object output A typical use case: Get-VMHost ESXi01 | Get-VMHostNetworkAdapterCDP would see the following output

Lots of hard work is already being put into organising this year’s UKVMUG. One of the best attributes of these type of events is the community content - real world content from real people, i.e. not Vendor A, B or C telling you that their latest product will solve all of your problems. (Of course that’s there too if you want to hear about that kind of thing) A critical aspect of community content is that you are always trying to bring new people through to bring content from different areas / backgrounds / experience.

Sometimes it can still be beneficial to use a native Windows executable rather than a PowerShell cmdlet, either because say the cmdlet doesn’t exist yet or doesn’t have the functionality that you require. Many of these executables though won’t behave in the way you have become accustomed to PowerShell cmdlets behaving - for instance some maybe noisy in terms of their output. Take for instance OpenSSL.exe. I was using this the other day to generate some certificates and it’s pretty noisy on its output.

I was surprised to discover that there were no native cmdlets for managing iSCSI VMKernel Port Binding in PowerCLI. So I made my own Get-VMHostiSCSIBinding and Set-VMHostiSCSIBinding functions and have shared them here in case anyone else finds them useful. Here’s a couple of examples of how they can be used: Retrieve iSCSI Port Binding details Get-VMHost ESXi01,ESXi02 | Get-VMHostiSCSIBinding -HBA "vmhba32" | Format-Table PortGroup,Vmknic,IPv4,IPv4SubnetMask,MACAddress -AutoSize 2) Set iSCSI Port Binding details

The UK PowerShell UserGroup has been running for around 6 years now, but has been a little quiet of late. My fellow PowerShell MVP Richard Siddaway is currently seeking feedback on how you might like to see the group develop in the future. So if you have attended in the past or would consider attending a future event, please give him your feedback and help shape the direction it takes.

Following a switch over from self-signed certificates for vCenter 5.1 to those signed by a internal CA, access to Update Manager via the vSphere Web Client (which seems fairly limited anyway in terms of Update Manager) no longer worked. It was failing with “There was an error connecting to VMware vSphere Update Manager.” The Webclient log file vsphere_client_virgo.log contains the following error ERROR [ERROR] http-bio-9443-exec-5 c.vmware.vum.client.adapters.updatemanager.aspects.LoggingAspect Exception caught in class ‘com.

I needed to migrate some Email Alarm Actions between two vCenters; the target at version 5.1 being a replacement for an existing 5.0 vCenter. The first task was to identify which Alarm Definitions had been configured with an email alert. To do that I used the following PowerCLI command to export them to a CSV file: Get-AlarmDefinition | Select Name,@{N="EmailAction";E={$\_ | Get-AlarmAction | Where {$\_.ActionType -eq "SendEmail"}}} | Export-Csv AlarmActions.csv -NoTypeInformation I could then easily identify those which needed to be migrated across.

I needed to check the configuration of all hosts in an environment for their ESXi Dump Collector Settings and then ensure they were all set to the correct values. I was using the handy ESXi Dump Collector which ships as part of the vCenter 5.1 package. There are no PowerCLI cmdlets for doing this (yet) so I made my own, Get-VMHostDumpCollector and Set-VMHostDumpCollector. Since you can get and set this item via esxcli I used the Get-ESXCli cmdlet for most of the work.

PowerCLI has shiped with cmdlets for managing the Syslog configuration of ESXi hosts for some time, Get-VMHostSysLogServer and Set-VMHostSysLogServer. Unfortunately, neither of these (yet) support the configurations mentioned in the below two posts for multiple Syslog servers or different protocols, such as SSL. http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2011/07/23/configure-a-vcenter-5-0-integrated-syslog-server/ http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/04/configuring-multiple-syslog-servers-for-esxi-5.html So for the time being I have put together two functions, Get-VMHostSyslogConfig and Set-VMHostSyslogConfig, to supplement what you can currently do with the following additional options: