Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Scripting

Snapshot info within vCenter?

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snapsHugo Peeters has done it again. He created another very usefull script. This time Hugo created a script which adds a “custom field” within vCenter with Snapshot information, the amount of snapshots that is.

Some of you might say that this lacks the detail one would love to see within vCenter. Well knowing Hugo my guess it that this will evolve fast, and I expect some cool additions coming up.

If you don’t want to wait just check his post, download the code and start modifying / adding yourself. Hugo outlined the concept so it should be fairly easy to add new functionality to it.

And if you haven’t done it by now, add Hugo’s blog to your RSS Reader or Bookmarks!

UPDATE: Free ESXi and the RCLI

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I just had a chat with several people of VMware about the fact that the RCLI is read/write as of ESX 3.5 Update 3. As it turns out, these new APIs were opened up unintentionally. This unintentional change happened when VMware was resolving an API-related bug.

My VMware contacts tell me that this bug will be fixed shortly. So, do not get used to them because they will become restricted again. This only applies to customers who downloaded the free version of ESXi. VirtualCenter and VI (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise) customers are not affected.

Zero-out all vm’s from just one script!

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I’ve been thinking for a while about this. How can I zero-out all my vm’s with just one schedule. I don’t want to manually add a schedule every single time I roll out a VM, I want a central point for administering this.

Today I noticed the blog on using the VIX API. The VIX API can be used for all sorts of things, including copying files to all your VM’s or installing MSI on your VM’s. (Check the blog article for a complete list of supported operations for the VMRUN command.)

If you can install MSI’s then you can also run a simple vbs script:

vmrun -T virtualcenter01 -h https://virtualcenter01.yellow-bricks.local/sdk -u root -p yell0wbricks -gu user -gp userpw runProgramInGuest "[storage1] Windows/Windows.vmx" c:\windows\system32\sdelfrag.vbs

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test it myself, but it should work just fine. If anyone is able to test it please let me know.

Thanks Carter!

Free ESXi and the RCLI

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One of the most discussed topics when ESXi was released for free was the fact the the Remote Command Line Interface(RCLI) was read only. Today Rich from VM/ETC.com dropped the news that as of ESXi 3.5 U3 the RCLI is read/write. Why is this important? For ESXi there’s no Service Console. The RCLI contains most Service Console commands which are very useful during maintenance, troubleshooting or automating certain tasks. I haven’t seen an official announcement yet unfortunately. But as soon as it’s up there I will post it here.

Get VMware Disk Usage with Powershell

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There are a couple of guys in the Virtualization Community that are really into powershell. Hugo Peeters is one of those guys. This time Hugo created a powershell script to track diskspace all the way from the VM’s filesystem to the VMFS Datastore:

So you might want to check if you are wasting a lot of this space. When you look at the storage in VMware, it consists of multiple abstraction layers. A virtual machine has one or more Logical Disks, which are indicated by driveletters. You can use WMI to determine the amount of used and free space (Win32_LogicalDisk). One or more logical disks are contained in a partition. One or more partitions reside on a physical disk. That physical disk is really a virtual disk, a vmdk file to be precise. One or more vmdk files reside in a Datastore, which can be found on a LUN on your SAN.
The following script enumerates most of these layers (from logical disk to datastore) and calculates the used and free space. The final line exports the results to a csv file for use in Excel. And the script also helps you to calculate the average free space by showing the totals without the duplicates (don’t try to average the averages in excel, that’s not accurate because datastores contain duplicates and averages should be weighed).

Check Hugo’s post for the script.