Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

powershell

VI Toolkit 1.5 & Podcast!

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VMware released version 1.5 of the VI Toolkit for Windows today! Most of you probably already read about it by now, if you didn’t here is the download link, and the link to the release notes.

So much have been added that it would be pointless to blog about all the changes, 32 new cmdlets and 25 new options for existing cmdlets. Check the release notes and the documentation for info on all these additions! Be sure to also check out these video’s, they give you a great view on the endless possibilities.

Carter Shanklin will join the VMTN Podcast today to discuss this new Release so join the podcast, it will start in 45 minutes from now(wednesday 28 January)!

Compare your hosts…

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One of the most promising features in my opinion for the upcoming version of ESX definitely is “Host Profiles”. With host profiles you can ensure that each and every single ESX Host has been installed in the same way. But this feature isn’t available yet, and you would probably like to know if at least all hosts in a Cluster share the same LUN’s and/or Portgroups.

Well, it’s no surprise probably that Hugo Peeters created a script that does exactly that:

This Powershell script generates an overview of any items that are not available to every ESX server in a VMware cluster. These items might prevent your vm’s being vmotioned by DRS or restarted by HA. Pretty serious business, I’d say!

The items involved are:
1. datastores
2. LUNs (important when using Raw Device Mappings)
3. port groups

Hugo exports the output to a nice html file so no more importing to Excel needed or whatever.

Hop over to Hugo and pick up the script. The link is at the bottom of the article!

Orphaned vmdk’s

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While doing a “mini-healthcheck” at a customer site I noticed a specific Datastore with less than 2% of free diskspace. After a bit of research an orphaned VMDK was found. Orphaned vmdk’s are virtual hard-disks that are not connected to a VM. Probably because they were removed from the inventory without deleting the files.

You can easily find these orphaned vmdk’s via the Service Console:

find -iname “*-flat.vmdk” -mtime +7

For those that don’t like using the Service Console you can also check this with Powershell Ad van Bokhoven created a nice script which he describes as follows:

This script asks the virtual center what the disk are of each VM and puts this into an array. After this, it reads all files on all datastores. If the file is a vmdk file, it will check wheter this file is in the array. If it’s not, you’ve found a orphaned vmd.

I would advise to regularly check your environment on orphaned disks, it can save precious diskspace.

Compare specific ESX configuration items

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Hugo posted a great script. It will compare configuration items between a given set of hosts. This can especially come in handy when you’ve got a huge amount of datastores, portgroups or a huge amount of ESX hosts for that matter. Hugo’s post contains a set of excellent examples. Just check his post for more details and the script, heres what the outcome would look like for now:

InputObject                         SideIndicator
———–                                ————-
esxServer1_Local               <=
esxServer2_Local               =>
DATASTORE_TEST1            =>

Update: Hugo just posted a follow up to his original blog. This new script creates a CSV file, which can be imported in to Excel for example and the result will look like this:

New version of the Powershell Healthcheck script released

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Ivo Beerens just published a new version of his Powershell Healthcheck script. The script will report the following in a nicely formatted html file:

  • VMware ESX server Hardware and version
  • VMware vCenter version
  • Cluster information
  • VMware statistics
  • Active Snapshots
  • CDROMs connected to VMs
  • Floppy drives connected to VMs
  • Datastores Information such as free space
  • RDM information
  • VM information such as VMware tools version,  processor and memory limits
  • VM’s and there datastore
  • VMware timesync enabled
  • Percentage disk space used inside the VM
  • VC error logs last 5 days

Go to Ivo’s website for the download of the script and the source blog post. I use this script personally just to keep track of changes and get a quick overview of the current situation of an environment.