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.
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={$\_.ExtensionData.Config.Tools.ToolsVersion}} However, the ToolsVersion property does not persist after running this command, so if I now try:
Recently a colleague had an issue where they were unable to add a newly built ESXi 4.1 server to vCenter; it failed with the message ‘The name “hostname” already exists.’ However, at first glance in vCenter the hostname didn’t exist.
The vCenter vpxd log contained more info, an error below:
Found host with duplicate IP x.x.x.x: host-xxxxx
You can track down the hostname from the host-xxxxx info with PowerCLI
Get-VMHost | Where-Object {$\_.
The here.
OK, so there are already a ton of blog posts out there on this topic which cover the pros and cons of this change. A couple I found useful are below:
Understanding vSphere Licensing - Barry Coombs vSphere Licensing - the good, the bad and the ugly - Ed Grigson Initially I thought this licensing change might be a bit of a problem for us, but thought I would wait for the dust to settle and spend some time figuring out what the impact could be.
When working with PowerCLI in a large environment and retrieving large amounts of data, particularly when using the Get-View cmdlet, you may receive the following error: Get-View Exception of type ‘System.OutOfMemoryException’ was thrown
Looking at the available memory on your system may cause you to wonder why you receive this error message. It may occur because you are running the 32-bit version of PowerCLI where the size of the heap is limited to 1.