The agenda for the next London VMUG on 19th July 2012 has been posted, looks like another great event - in particular I reckon you should get there for the NDA session. Centrix Software Presentation Fusion-IO Presentation Whiptail Presentation EMC Labs Throughout the Day Lee Dilworth - VMware Availability Update: vSphere Replication, Stretched Clusters and BCDR Darren Woollard and Gregg Robertson - vSphere Nerdknobs Chris Evans - The Storage Architect’s View Chris Gale - Fusion-IO More Desktops.

I had a need to automate the installation of Citrix XenDesktop DDC including using some of the different available install options. XenDesktopServerSetup.exe is the command line tool to use. Running XenDesktopServerSetup.exe /? displays most of the options that can be used, however I found a couple missing which are documented here. The Install-XenDesktopDDC function below will enable you to install XenDesktop with different options. For instance, to install all components, but no SQL Express and see the install steps:

The public vote for sessions at VMworld opened today and there are a crazy number of great sessions to choose to vote for. I decided to give it a go myself this year, so have teamed up with my good buddy Hal Rottenberg to put forward the session 2112 Transforming Your Automation Scripts with Advanced PowerShell / PowerCLI. If you would like to see us present it, then please consider voting it up!

The PowerShell community extensions module contains Test-XML which can perform a number of checks for the validity of an XML file. For my particular needs I wasn’t able to take a dependency on an external module, consequently I needed to make something similar of my own to carry out some basic tests. The below function makes use of the XmlException exception from the XmlDocument class . An attempt is made to load the XML file and then any Load or Parse errors are caught by the XmlException exception.

The next London VMUG takes place this Thursday May 17th and there’s still time to register. The line-up looks great as usual and in particular some excellent community content is on the agenda from well known regular faces at the VMUG. Hope to see you there. London VMUG Meeting

I had a, shall we say urgent, need to get up and running with Citrix XenDesktop 5 in a very short space of time. Having used some of the TrainSignal products before and had a very good experience with them my first thought was to head over to their site and see if they had anything available. Thankfully, they have courses for both XenDesktop 4 and 5 so I was able to get hold of the XenDesktop 5 course.

Some PowerShell cmdlets include switch parameters, i.e. no arguments are typically supplied to them - they are either True / On when they are present and False / Off when they are not. However, it is also possible to explicitly specify them with $true and $false, e.g. -switchparameter:$true or -switchparameter:$false Typically you would not use this when working manually at the console, but what if you needed to automate a task using a switch parameter and set it to be On or Off based on values from a CSV or XML file, i.

Here’s a quick tip for you when using PowerShell’s -match operator. The other day I was given a script to work on which was producing some (to the naked eye) confusing results, turned out the behaviour was actually consistent when you figured out what was happening. Here’s an example: Take the following text and store it in two variables: $a = "This is some text. It includes (brackets)" $b = "This is some text.

In an Active Directory environment its typical for client machines to use a local domain controller as their time source, domain controllers with the PDC emulator for the domain and the PDC emulator for the root domain to synchronise time with an external source. In most circumstances the aim is to keep the time synchronised within a 5 minute tolerance level, this will ensure there are no issues with Kerberos authentication which has the 5 minute tolerance as part of its requirements.

I experienced a vSphere HA event where VMs restarted on other hosts and I was requested by management to confirm which VMs had restarted. Details are stored within vCenter events, but trawling through those manually for multiple VMs would be pretty tedious. Enter of course, PowerCLI. The Get-VIEvent cmdlet enables you to search through the events, but to a certain extent it kind of helps if you know what you are looking for since there is so much information to look through.