After my PowerCLI session at yesterday’s London VMUG a few people asked me for the content. I believe the content from all sessions will soon be posted to http://www.box.net/londonug, but in the meantime you can get my slides from the below link.
PowerCLI Workshop London VMUG.pptx
Thanks to all who chatted to me afterwards, its always nice to know that someone got something out of a session you put on.
I recieved a preview copy of the vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide a few weeks back from my good friend and PowerCLI expert Alan Renouf . It is a great read and because of its size is really handy fo carrying around and referring to without needing to lug a 700 page book around with you. (Having said that I do currently have Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere in my bag at the moment!
As a system administrator it is often not the latest and greatest big new features of a new operating system which you end up finding the most useful, sometimes its the small improvements which really make your life easier. I’ve been spending a lot more time with Windows Server 2008 recently (OK, I know R2 is out, but it takes time for large organisations to move away from older OS’s and applications.
I have been lucky enough to be invited to run a PowerCLI pre-show workshop before the main event of the next London VMUG on 24th November. A couple of VMUG’s back Alan Renouf ran a similar session on how to get started with PowerCLI. I thought this time I would move things one step on so the kind of topics I am likely to cover are reporting scripts and how you can make practical use of them, oneliners to get you great information and take a look at the VESI.
A while back I needed to confirm what level of BIOS firmware a bunch of ESX hosts were at. Unfortunately I ran out of time to look properly, but today I discovered how to do it whilst looking through the VMware SDK for something else. Turns out it is very simple:
$VMHost = Get-VMHost ‘Server01’ | Get-View $VMHost.Hardware.BiosInfo
This will give you results along the lines:
BiosVersion ReleaseDate DynamicType DynamicProperty ———– ———– ———– ————— 2.
More stats for my capacity report, this time I want to know on a typical day in the month what is the average CPU and memory use like across my hosts and clusters. Note: this post is not aimed at troubleshooting performance issues, rather at a high level gives me a reasonable idea of the CPU and memory use in each cluster during peak and non-peak hours. By running this each month I can look at possible trends and where extra resource may be required.
More stats for my capacity report, this time numbers of VM’s in total in Virtual Center and average per host in each cluster. Obviously performance is not based on the numbers of VM’s per host, but its an interesting figure to keep track of.
Connect-VIServer virtualcenter | Out-Null
Total number of hosts $TotalVMHosts = Get-VMHost $TotalVMHostsCount = $TotalVMHosts.count Write-Host “There are $TotalVMHostsCount Hosts in $DefaultVIServer” # Total number of guests $TotalVMs = Get-VM $TotalVMsCount = $TotalVMs.
As part of some monthly stats I need to collate, I had to find out how much SAN storage was being used by my ESX hosts. Luckily we have a pretty good naming convention for our datastores so it’s pretty easy to filter out local storage figures. We simply query Virtual Centre for datastores, filter out any local ones, total up their capacity and then convert the figure into Terabytes.
During the last month whilst some colleagues have been away on their holidays, I’ve been spending a lot more time with our Virtual Infrastructure than normal and I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve picked up along the way. They are probably no brainers for your hardcore VMware administrators, but for those like me who aren’t 100% dedicated to one specific area, and particularly have been long time Windows admins, there’s nothing like getting really involved with something for a few weeks to really get to grips with how this stuff works.
I was lucky enough to take on a project initially started and blogged about by my co-host on the Get-Scripting podcast Alan Renouf.
In summary, his posts were mainly around the design decision of whether to go for VM’s with one or two vCPU’s and how many Citrix users you could support per VM. Following on from his initial testing using Citrix Edgesight we ran a pilot with a few different scenarios and it turned out that the best performance with the highest number of Citrix users per VM came out to be a VM with 2 x vCPU’s; a conclusion which didn’t really match the initial testing, I guess you can’t beat real users doing real work and the sometimes crazy things they get up to pushing the boundries of performance.