Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for November 2009

The uncrowned king of PowerCLI is Alan Renouf

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No, I am not exaggerating. Alan Renouf truly is the uncrowned king of PowerCLI. Although I’ve seen some amazing scripts from other people as well Alan always seems to bring that little extra to make him stand out. No this is not an Alan Renouf appreciation blog article, although he deserves one, this article is about his two latest additions.

The first one is the Virtu-Al VESI & PowerGui Powerpack. If you are like me, not a powercli hero, this is what you were looking for all along. Alan has bundled all his script into a Powerpack which enables you to import all his scripts at once and run them with a single click. All scripts are placed into categories which makes them easy to find. Not only can you use them you can also modify them to your needs. Of course if you do improve these scripts give some feedback to Alan so that he might be able to incorporate it into the Powerpack.

The second one is Version 3 of the daily report or vCheck as it is called as of v3. I wrote about version 1 and many people have downloaded it and are using it in their environment. The script just got better and a whole set of new features have been added. Alan was smart enough to ask around in the community what his report was lacking and incorporated all these tips in Version 3 of vCheck(previously known as the Daily Report). Again, if you feel there is anything missing don’t hesitate to leave a comment and ask Alan if he can add it… Here’s the list of new features:

  • Status report to screen whilst running interactively
  • At the top of the script you can now turn off any areas you do not want to report on (this makes it faster to run)
  • VMs on Local storage has been changed to report VMs stored on datastores attached to only one host
  • VM active alerts
  • Cluster Active Alerts
  • If HA Cluster is set to use host datastore for swapfile, check the host has a swapfile location set
  • Host active Alerts
  • Dead SCSI Luns
  • VMs with over x amount of vCPUs
  • vSphere check: Slot Sizes
  • vSphere check: Outdated VM Hardware (Less than V7)
  • VMs in Inconsistent folders (the name of the folder is not the same as the name)
  • Added the number of issues to each title line

Carter can you please hand over your crown to Alan?! Thanks,

VMTN Podcast number 71, vStorage API

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This weeks topic of the VMware Communities Roundtable was the vStorage API. It was most likely one of the most technical roundtables in months. Especially the part about the Virtual Disk Development Kit (aka VDDK) was educational! If you missed the episode you can download it here or subscribe to the podcast with iTunes here!

Here are the links that were dropped in the chat window for those who are interested:

Document it…

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Something that I noticed over the last months while doing design reviews is that hardly anyone documents decisions in a design. Most designs I review are physical designs, which is understandable as most IT people are technical people who could not care less about logical designs. I am perfectly fine with that, although I do recommend taking a different approach, as long as you document why you are going down a specific path.

There can be specific constraints or requirements (both technical and business related) which justify your decision, but if you don’t document these constraints or requirements chances are someone will change the design based on a false assumption and who knows what it will lead to…

New theme…

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Just like Jason Boche I thought it was time to renew my Blog theme. I had the old one for over 8 months already and it was time to renew it. I tried to keep it simple again and actually downsized the banners. Also removed some of the Google Adsense blocks as it was too much. Hopefully you guys like the result and of course I appreciate feedback!