March 22 we have Tome Tanasovski presenting on Regular Expressions. Tome is a Windows engineer for a market-leading global financial services firm in New York City. He is a recipient of the PowerShell MVP award, the founder and leader of the New York City PowerShell User group, a blogger, and a regular contributor to Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell forum. He has been featured four times on Hey Scripting Guy, and he is currently working on the PowerShell Bible, which is due out in 2011 from Wiley.

Want to get to grips with PowerShell, but commitments or budget prevent you from training during the week? Well PowerShell MVP and experienced trainer Thomas Lee will be running three PowerShell PowerCamps in the UK over the next few months as two-day training sessions on weekends. The cost is £200 and the dates are as follows: March 19 - 20, London March 26 - 27, York June 18 - 19, York

Last year I was fortunate enough to be invited to help out Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens with their PowerCLI book project and write a few chapters to help them keep on schedule. I was also joined by two other well known PowerCLI community members Glenn Sizemore and Arnim van Lieshout. It is often said that ‘Virtualisation is a journey’ - well writing a book about virtualisation was definitely a journey!

PowerShell 2 is installed by default in Windows Server 2008 R2. However, the other day I went on to a server with this OS and went to use the PowerShell ISE (which I switched to as my default console a year ago) and found that it wasn’t there: Turns out that the ISE is not installed by default and needs to be added as a Feature: This is different to a manual install of PowerShell 2 on Windows 2008 / 2003 where the ISE is included as part of the Windows Management Framework Install.

In ESXi 4.0 the Advanced Software Setting UserVars.CIMOEMProvidersEnabled is used to enable an agent such as the Dell OpenManage offline bundle for ESXi which provides hardware management for Dell PowerEdge servers. This is supplied as a vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) and Alan Renouf has a great post on his blog on how to install a VIB like this one via PowerCLI. Whilst testing out getting the same Dell Agent installed into ESXi 4.

The PowerShell team are putting together the first ever PowerShell conference, to be held in Las Vegas April 18th - 19th. The focus on the conference will be advanced deep dives into various PowerShell topics so is being aimed at those already comfortable with using PowerShell. Attendees will include members of the PowerShell team, such as Jeffrey Snover, Lee Holmes and Bruce Payette - and likely also many PowerShell MVPs and others well known in the community.

Following an upgrade of vCenter to 4.1 does your performance data look like this? or even emptier like this? Then you are probably suffering from the same issue I was after an upgrade of vCenter from 4.0 to 4.1. Initally a web search brought up the following KB article, kb.vmware.com/kb/1004382, but this did not resolve the issue. VMware Support then directed me to the following KB article which appeared to describe the issue more accurately, kb.

I recently posted Episode 21 of the Get-Scripting podcast featuring an interview with my good friend, PowerShell MVP and leader of the UK PowerShell User Group Richard Siddaway. Richard is the author of PowerShell in Practice and an upcoming book PowerShell and WMI , in the interview we cover the motivation behind these books and the kind of content you can expect to get from them. In Episode 21 we are also running a competition with some great prize giveaways.

Depending on your environment you may find the ability to install ESXi from a USB stick, particularly if you do not have access to a PXE based deployment solution. With ESXi 4.0 I had used a USB stick with the install ISO on the stick. Whilst starting to test 4.1 I thought it would be a simple case of replacing the 4.0 ISO with 4.1. However, when I did this I was able to boot to the install, but when it got to the part of copying the files I received the error:

I often get asked about useful resources for learning PowerShell, in particular what good books are available. So I have compiled a list of PowerShell books that I own and would recommend. (Note: all of the links point to Amazon UK for (my) convenience. Other book sellers and countries are available) General Windows PowerShell 2.0 - Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks This is a great book for a beginner to PowerShell either with previous scripting experience.