The second Community Technology Preview of PowerShell V3 is now available. This pre-beta release gives of a flavour of areas of change which may appear in the final release. A CTP has an emphasis on Community , i.e. the PowerShell team is looking for plenty of feedback for this release while they still have time to change things. Below are items logged on Connect by the community which have been fixed since the release of CTP1 - so if you find an issue in your testing, please log it on Connect so it can be reviewed and potentially resolved.

I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of TrainSignal’s VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package and here are my thoughts on the experience. I’m disclosing the fact upfront that it was a review copy and I hope you will trust that my opinons are genuine. I had previously used TrainSignal’s Exchange 2010 package to quickly get up to speed on a project I was working on at the time which had proven to be a great resource.

As promised, here are my slides from this evening’s UK PowerShell UserGroup - What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0. What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0 View more presentations from jonathanmedd sf

I recently had a task to query NIC information on a number of HP Proliant servers, this included the connected NIC speed, duplex settings and status of the configured HP Team. I initally looked at the WMI class Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration which contains a lot of info around NIC configuration. Unfortunately, it does not include NIC speed or duplex settings. Looking for alternatives, I discovered a script from Hugo Peeters which instead queried the registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} which looked like it would do the job.

A quick post to let you know that I shall be presenting for an online meeting of the UK PowerShell User Group on the topic of ‘What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0’ at 21.00 GMT on Tuesday November 22nd. Details on how to join in are available from Richard Siddaway’s website. Hope you can join us.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend VMworld Europe 2011 in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, so here’s a wrap up post of my experiences there. I wasn’t sure until pretty much the last minute whether I would be able to go or not since my change in employment status was happening around the same time. Thankfully it worked out and my new employer allowed a few days off early in the contract to be able to attend the event.

There are a lot of great reasons to sign up for the UK National VMUG on November 3rd 2011, full details are below. One reason to highlight is that during the day, Alan Renouf and I will be staffing the PowerCLI Drop In Area. We’re currently finalising the details, but this will likely consist of pre-prepared PowerCLI lab content for you to work through and also an opportunity to ask PowerCLI or PowerShell questions.

Update 19/02/2015 Following some recent changes in US tax treaties the original information in this post appears to now be out of date. I received some communication which suggest things have now changed for UK and other citizens. I suggest you don’t take this advice as definitive, but do your own research to confirm it and liaise with the organisation you are working for. You will need to submit a W8BEN form.

If you are not already aware of the phenomenon that is PowerCLI-Man, well, where have you been? My sources tell me he may be making an appearance at VMworld Europe, so if you are not already going, I highly recommend you attend. In particular I would encourage you to attend VSP1882 or VSP1883 for your best chance to see him……… PowerCLI @ VMworld Europe from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.

*****Warning. This is from a preview release****** PowerShell ISE in v2 allowed you to create your own custom menu items via PowerShell script (a good example can be found on the Hey Scripting Guy blog) PowerShell ISE in v3 ships with an Add-on built in called Commands. This Add-on places (by default) a Commands entry in the Add-on Tools Pane as below: This Add-on is a very useful learning and reference tool since it provides access to help info for cmdlets and will help you add the necessary parameters you are looking for.