powercli

A few weeks ago I attended the first ever UK based VMUG at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. Put together by the same folks who arrange the London VMUG events, it was a great day out and obviously a lot of hard work had been put in by Jane, Alaric, Simon , Stuart and Martyn. I know they had put the best part of 6 months into arranging it, so a lot of effort.

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

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.

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.

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.

I have really enjoyed my time at my current employer, there are some amazingly talented people who work / have worked there during the time I have spent there. However, for various reasons I have decided that it is time to move on and try something different by going freelance contracting. So while I work out my notice period I will be looking for a contract as my next opportunity.

The PowerCLI team publish very handy reference posters that will sit nicely by your desk and usually release a new version to accompany each product release. vSphere 5 is no different and if you weren’t lucky enough to attend the recent VMworld and collect a tangible copy then you can now download one to print out yourself.

In PowerShell it is possible to use custom properties for an object if the one you need does not exist by default - these are known as calculated properties. For instance, in PowerCLI by default there is no ToolsVersion property for a VM, however we can create a calculated property named ToolsVersion and submit an expression to retrieve that data: Get-VM TEST01 | Select-Object Name,@{Name="ToolsVersion";Expression={$\_.ExtensionData.Config.Tools.ToolsVersion}} However, the ToolsVersion property does not persist after running this command, so if I now try:

VMware vExpert and general virtualisation legend Tom Howarth has very kindly decided to give away an additional copy of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference that he has spare. All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning is submit a PowerShell based script via Tom’s site and I will pick a winner to receive the book. Full details from Planet VM: -———————————————————————————————————————————————- I’ve received a copy of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference as a review copy, but I have already purchased one.

Recently a colleague had an issue where they were unable to add a newly built ESXi 4.1 server to vCenter; it failed with the message ‘The name “hostname” already exists.’ However, at first glance in vCenter the hostname didn’t exist. The vCenter vpxd log contained more info, an error below: Found host with duplicate IP x.x.x.x: host-xxxxx You can track down the hostname from the host-xxxxx info with PowerCLI Get-VMHost | Where-Object {$\_.