Powershell VI Toolkit

Today I combined a couple of Powershell scripts which as a result gives a nice html formatted file with a table. This table contains all VM’s with their VMware Tools status and version. I’ve uploaded the script here. The outcome looks like the following:

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Weird scripted install problems

Today I was testing a scripted installation for a customer. All day long I had weird problems with the script. But whenever I reviewed my script their seemed to be nothing wrong with it. I wrote the scripts with Notepad++ and double checked them with vi and nano. You can imagine I almost threw my […]

VI Powershell: Creating a PSDrive to browse your inventory

Just stumbled upon this cool article about mounting your VI inventory as a drive via Powershell:
source - Hal Rottenberg aka halr9000:

Establish a connection to your the server using the Get-VIServer command:
Get-VIServer -Server

for example,
Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.10.10

When prompted, provide the administrator’s username and password to authenticate access on the server.
Get the root folder […]

Powershell Toolkit beta coming up and VMworld lab PDF!

Eric Sloof just pointed us out to the Blog on the VMware website about the upcoming Powershell Toolkit Beta. I have been playing around with this toolkit for a while but had a hard time figuring out how to actually make useful scripts. The PDF that was also released has some cool examples of useful […]

esx-autopatch.pl

For all those not using the VirtualCenter Update Manager, Dominic uploaded an update on his esx-autopatch.pl script. You can now also patch 3.5 hosts with this script, which can come in handy for scripted installs!

Selective VCB fullvm images

During the VMware course DSA I discovered that it is in fact possible to dump specific vmdk’s with the use of the default VCB tools. While I was finding out a way to script this I was notified in one of my blogs by JTurver(Justin Turver) that he already wrote a script that could do […]

Checking for snapshots, html email report!

When reading the VMTN forum I stumbled upon a topic about checking the VMFS for snapshots. Besides snaphunter by Xtravirt, which is an excellent script, there isn’t much out there. You can check the VirtualCenter database for snapshots but this way you would not notice the orphaned snapshots. (Orphaned snapshot occur when the vmsd file […]

VCB - Backup all running VMs

Today I was busy trying to find out a way to schedule VCB backups with Commvault with just 1 schedule without having to rewrite your script every time someone creates a VM. The standard procedure is to create a subclient for every VM which is very human error prone. I stumbled upon a blog on […]

VMware ESX healthcheck

One of the most useful scripts for ESX in my opinion is health_check.sh. This scripts generates an html file which contains a enormous amount of useful info on how the ESX host was installed. Besides that it contains 30 lines of the most important log files and for instance if there are snapshots and much […]

Howto: Sending html email from the service console

When writing the “Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes” blog I assumed that most of you knew how to send an email from the service console. I received a bunch of emails from people who were interested in how to setup the html email functionality. Well, here it is:
A while back VMGuru.com hosted a […]