I recently passed the VCP-IaaS exam and thought I would share the resources I used in case it is useful for anyone else. This is the exam which gives those already certified as VCP on vSphere, the VCP-Cloud certification. I took the VMware vCloud Director: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.1] course as my primary source. I enjoyed the course and felt it had a good mix of theory and hands on work.

Event 2 for the PowerShell Scripting Games 2013 has closed, here are a few learning points I picked up on from entries submitted. 1) Win32_Processor This event is a bit of a sneaky one and if you haven’t been affected by the issue before then you may not know it. The particular issue I am referring to here is that “The number of physical hyperthreading-enabled processors or the number of physical multicore processors is incorrectly reported in Windows Server 2003”.

Event 1 for the PowerShell Scripting Games 2013 has closed, here are a few learning points I picked up on from entries submitted. 1) Get-ChildItem -Recurse When you need to retrieve files from paths with subfolders the Recurse parameter of Get-ChildItem makes this really easy. For instance Get-ChildItem -Path C:\\Application\\Log -Filter \*.log -Recurse is a really easy way to return everything below C:\Application\Log. In the specific instance of this event, this is OK because you only have three subfolders, but potentially there could be a lot more and some of them might not be relevant.

Looking for a good way to start learning PowerShell or fancy testing yourself with some more advanced problems to solve? It’s time again for the annual Scripting Games and this year the PowerShell community are running the event, ably supported by the Microsoft Scripting Guy. There are separate Beginner and Advanced tracks and plenty of prizes to be won in each event. I’ll be helping out with the other community judges to highlight some of the entries.

Update 20/07/2015: The details in this post are now superseded by a post I have made using the Brickset API. -——————————————————————————————————————— I’ve always enjoyed Lego and it’s currently experiencing a resurgence in our house thanks to strategic hinting encouragement that my children would find it fun too. (It seems like I’m not the only one) What does tend to happen though is that as sets are pulled apart played with we often need to dig out the instructions to put entire sets pieces back together again.

Start-BitsTransfer enables you to download multiple files using Windows’ Background Intelligent Transfer Service , including the ability to have them processed as background jobs. I encountered an issue when submitting these jobs if the number of files where greater than 60, the 61st and onwards would fail to submit until the existing jobs had been completed or cleared. Start-BitsTransfer : Object reference not set to an instance of an object. At line:1 char:1 + Start-BitsTransfer -Source "http://intranet.

There’s still time to register for the next London VMUG on April 25th 2013. As usual some excellent sessions are lined up – hope to see you there!

A colleague of mine experienced this issue recently where after making a PowerCLI connection to a vCenter and instantly running a command such as Get-VM, he would be prompted by the error: Get-VM. Not authenticated. Possible cause of this error is that the connection was left unused for a while and session has timed out. Checking he was connected to a vCenter appeared to indicate that he was, i.e. $global:defaultVIServer returned a value.

The majority of my PowerShell code is written in a Windows VM where all the typical native PowerShell tools are available. However, occasionally I may want to quickly view or make small changes to some code in OS X. It’s possible via the built-in TextEdit application, but that’s kind of the equivalent of using Notepad on Windows, i.e. a pretty basic experience. I recently read this review of Text Editors on The Register and decided to check out Sublime after discovering PowerShell could be added as an additional language to support syntax highlighting.

Accessing environment variables in PowerShell is easy, either: dir env: to view all of them, or: dir env:ProgramFiles to access a specific one. However, if you try that for the ProgramFiles(x86) environment variable you are greeted with the following error: PS C:\\> dir env:ProgramFiles(x86) x86 : The term 'x86' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.