I don’t believe that PowerCLI 5.1 is yet officially supported on Windows 8, however that’s where I wanted to run it. While carrying out the installation I hit this issue, i.e. .NET Framework 2.0 was not installed as a pre-requisite. This is because PowerShell 3.0 on Windows 8 uses .NET 4 and no longer has .NET 2.0 as a requirement. To install .NET Framework 2.0 in Windows 8 you need to turn on .

The agenda for this year’s UKVMUG has been published and looks tremendous. I know how much effort is put into organising this event and they look to have surpassed themselves this time. One great thing to highlight is the amount of community content there is amongst the published sessions, definitely putting the User back into a User Group. Watch out too for a further announcement about even more community content to be included as part of the day.

Hidden away amongst some of the new language features in PowerShell v3 are two new operators: -in and -notin. Previously you could use -contains, say in an example like the following: does the variable $fruits contain the string ‘Apple’? $fruits = 'Apple','Orange','Pear' $fruits -contains 'Apple' $fruits -contains 'Banana' There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but in many examples for me it seemed to be the wrong way around from that I was naturally thinking: is the string ‘Apple’ in the variable $fruits?

Recently I was working with some XML documents along the lines of the following. Each set of data had some common elements, Name and Description and other elements based around a pattern, Filepathx. [xml] [/xml] I needed to check the path for any of these that were present in each dataset. Working with XML files in PowerShell is pretty straightforward. For instance to work with the above file you could start with:

Registration for this year’s UK VMUG User Conference is now open. This was a great event last year and from what I’ve heard it’s shaping up to be at least as good this year. The agenda so far is below. I highly recommend you attend the evening before, since again there will be a vCurry and a chance to network with attendees before the event. VMUG is pleased to offer top notch education at our user conferences.

We all know what fun Visio can be to work with right? :-) When working with Visio documents of multiple pages, navigating quickly between them isn’t easy in the default view (I’m talking say 30 - 50 pages and not scrolling across hunting the right one down) This is where the ‘Go To Page’ button can come in handy when added to the Quick Access Toolbar, which will list all pages in a handy drop-down.

Last year’s UK VMUG was a fantastic event and the guys are already planning this year’s event, scheduled for November 15th. They’ve just put out a Call for Papers, so if you have a good virtualisation topic, whether a good story from your workplace or info about a particular area of interest, then go fill out this form and you’ll be in with a chance of taking part. If you haven’t contributed to an event like this before, then here are a few reasons why I would encourage you to do so.

First up on Wednesday I managed to squeeze into the early 8am PowerCLI session of Alan and Luc who covered some great info on PowerCLI Best (or recommended :-) ) Practices. I stayed in the same room for another automation session from William Lam and Alan who covered some of the new features in 5.1. William also demonstrated something engineers have been working on which I think was a way for linux based engineers to talk to vCenter and automate tasks in a similar way to PowerCLI.

So last day of VMworld and a short post to finish things off. The general session has some non-VMware sessions up with some football playing robots and the Google self-drive car. I visited the vSphere Design session with Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie which was one of the best sessions I attended all week. Lots of useful information for the thought processes you need to put into a vSphere design.

So I’m finding the choice of food, shall we say interesting. If you’re not used to the American ‘breakfast’ then you might need to shop around yourself, here I was hunting for some fruit: First up today was the Keynote with Steve Herrod and today was all about End User Computing. There were a lot of bloggers in the community lounge, so I figured it would be good to watch it in there where it would be live streamed on the big screen.