So after yesterday’s poor start I was really hoping for better today and thankfully it was. First up was the keynote, starting out with some drummers, which seemed to influence some of the speakers later using words they shouldn’t be using at that age like ‘jiggy’. It was streamed live and you can watch it here if you missed it. The first main announcement was around vSphere 5.1 and it being bundled up into the vCloud Suite along with vCloud Director and Site Recovery Manager.

So, I have been looking forward to this trip for a LONG time. Having been to a couple of VMworld Europe events I decided it was time to cross the pond and check out the US version. Decided to fly out a few days early and check out some San Francisco sites, which has been great. Today was the first official day of the conference with registration open and the labs advertised as available for most of the day.

Fellow London VMUG regulars and vExperts Barry Coombs and Mike Laverick have recently self published a new title Building EUC Solutions with VMware View. This book covers the most recent release of View 5.1 and having been privileged to help review one of the chapters and already get myself 1/4 the way through the book it is looking to be a phenomenal effort. The authors have a lot of real world experience and translate this into the book.

I’ve needed to use multiple values in a PowerShell Switch statement a number of times recently and can never quite remember the syntax, so thought it would be useful to get it down on paper so to speak. In PowerShell you can use a switch statement instead of using multiple if statements, e.g. $a = 3 switch ($a) { 1 {"It is one."} 2 {"It is two."} 3 {"It is three.

This issue came up during my PowerShell class today and since I couldn’t find any information about it, I thought it was worth a quick post. There aren’t many practical reasons for running a cmdlet with the ComputerName parameter and localhost as the computer other than for demo or training purposes when you may not have a remote machine to test against. Running the below may result in the error ‘Couldn’t connect to remote machine’

With the imminent release of Windows 8 and Server 2012, it’s definitely time to start preparing for PowerShell v3 which will ship as part of those releases. We recorded the latest edition of the Get-Scripting Podcast with PowerShell MVP Jonathan Noble and specifically focus on a number of topics worth checking out to get you up to speed with v3. Jonathan provides an overview on his blog of the topics we covered and some useful links.

In PowerShell you use Get-PSSnapin to view available third-party snapins for PowerShell on your system. However, some snapins may ship versions in 64bit, 32bit or both. If you install a 32bit snapin on a 64bit machine and then run Get-PSSnapin from 64bit PowerShell, only 64bit snapins will be displayed - which can lead to some initial confusion. Consider the following example of two 32bit snapins installed on a 64bit machine. 64bit PowerShell has no knowledge of them, but 32bit does.

The following is a PowerShell wrapper for msiexec.exe that enables you to automate the installation of MSI packages. You will see in the code that I picked certain msiexec options that were required for the particular need I had, such as quiet install (/qn). If you need other options, simply add or remove them to the arguments section. The function takes pipeline input, so to install an msi you can do the following

Thanks for all who attended my session on PowerShell and XenDesktop 5 at the UK PowerShell UserGroup last night. As promised here are my slides for reference. PowerShell in XenDesktop 5 View more PowerPoint from jonathanmedd

I’ll be presenting tonight for the UK PowerShell UserGroup on using PowerShell to administer your XenDesktop environment. I’ll be providing some info on how the management of XenDesktop is built on top of PowerShell and how to get started using it. Details from Richard’s site below: Reminder–UK PowerShell UserGroup–July 2012 meeting When: Wednesday, Jul 4, 2012 8:30 PM (BST) Where: Virtual *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Jonathan Medd will be talking about using PowerShell to administer a XenDesktop environment