by Duncan Epping
Rob de Veij just uploaded a minor update of RVTools, version 2.4.1. Make sure you download it and replace the 2.4 version I blogged about just three days ago.
The new filter throws an exception when there are ESX hosts which do not belong to any cluster. With the help from Mario Vinet this problem is now solved! Thanks again Mario.
In my Lab I was exploring the upgrade possibilities from ESX 3.5 to the next version. Usually I do a full reinstall just to be absolutely sure there’s no old packages floating around. For testing purposes I decided to do an upgrade of the ESX host. I opened up Update Manager and with a couple simple clicks I upgraded my host to the next version. (I did an upgrade of vCenter and Update Manager before I even started.) I removed a couple of screenshots that didn’t contain much useful info, in total it were 15 steps to create a baseline and update the host:
Create a new Baseline:
[Read more…] about Upgrading ESX 3.5 to the next version with Update Manager
Another update again by Rob de Veij, RVTools 2.4. This release includes a new feature, filtering. Rob also revealed that the upcoming version will contain health checks. Here are the changes:
Version 2.4 (March 2009)
Now head over to Rob’s website and download the new version!
I’ve been playing around with powershell yesterday. We needed to create over 100 VM’s and there’s no point in doing that all by hand. The customer provided us with a .csv file that contained specific info on these VM’s. It took me a while to figure out how to read the info.csv file and how to actually use it. But as always it’s actually fairly simple and that’s why I decided to write it down:
Before we even start, the CSV should be formatted as follows:
vmname,cluster
VM001,HA-DRS-Yellow-Bricks
Read the complete csv file into a variable:
$csv_info = Import-Csv c:\scripts\info.csv
For every line in the csv variable do something:
foreach ($line in $csv_info) {
write-host " This is virtual machine $($line.vmname) on cluster $($line.cluster)"
}
This line would print something like this:
This is virtual machine VM001 on cluster HA-DRS-Yellow-Bricks
As you noticed in the example above we used $line.vmname to get the name of the VM printed and $line.cluster for the cluster name, cool huh! BTW, Alan’s quick reference guide really helped me out!
Last week the well known powershell guru Alan Renouf helped me out with a script for enabling virtualized MMU. This week I needed to set Disk.UseDeviceReset to “0” on at least 60 hosts. (Check the link for more info on why!) No point in doing it all by hand when the VI Toolkit can help you out and set this parameter for the entire environment with just one line:
Get-VMHost | Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name Disk.UseDeviceReset -Value 0
I’m really starting to get excited about the VI Toolkit, thanks to guys like Alan and of course the VMworld VI Toolkit Lab I did a couple of weeks ago. With the quick reference guide that Alan created it’s very simple to come up with one-liners like the one above.
DEPRECATED See this article for more info.