Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Scripting

PowerCLI: Upgrading vHardware to vSphere Part 1: Templates

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One of the blogs I’ve always enjoyed reading is ICT-Freak.nl. ICT-Freak is maintained by Arne Fokkema. Unfortunately Arne used to mix Dutch and English posts which means his blog is not aggregated on Planet V12n. This is why I wanted to point you out to the following awesome article:

With the release of vSphere VMware introduced a new hardware level for VM’s. De upgrade process to the new hardware level is already described on Scott Lowe’s blog: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/06/01/vsphere-virtual-machine-upgrade-process/.

I wanted to see if I could script this process with PowerCLI. My first goal was to upgrade al my templates.

The script does the following:

  • Export template names to CSV
  • Convert templates back to VM’s
  • Check the vHardware version of the VM. If the hardware version is version 4 start the VM
  • When the VM is ready check the VMware Tools version. If the VMware Tools are old, the script will install the new version.
  • When the VMware Tools are Ok the VM gets a shutdown.
  • When the VM is down, the vHardware will be upgraded
  • The final step is converting the VM back to a template.

I stripped out the link to his script, please visit the source article and download the script over there.

Open source VI(vSphere) Java API 2.0 GA!

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For all the developers out there, I just received the following from my colleague Steve Jin:

VI (VSphere) Java API 2.0 was GAed last night. The 2.0 release represents 6 months of continuous (after work) engineering effort since this January. It has packed many features:

New high performance web service engine. When I told people that we replaced AXIS, most of them wanted me to confirm what I said. The new engine is 15X faster in loading, 4+X in de-serialization than AXIS 1.4 with only 1/4 of size.

  • vSphere 4 support.
  • REST client API.
  • Caching framework API.
  • Multiple version support with single set of APIs.
  • Clean licenses. The API and dependent dom4j are all BSD licenses.

The open source project was sponsored by VMware but not supported by VMware. To download it, visit http://vijava.sf.net

Code Central

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I visit the VMTN Communities daily and recently noticed a new section called Code Central. I didn’t pay attention to it cause I thought it was a private section but apparently it is not. Nava Davuluri introduced this new section and his role within VMware recently in a blog article:

I’m Nava Davuluri, a new hire into Product Marketing. This is my third month at VMware and things are off to a great start! One of the highlight events at my job so far includes attending the new vSphere launch, where I got to see business leaders in computer technology talk about how VMware products are increasing efficiency(performance, power and hardware) control( security and service levels) and choice (hardware, OS and application architecture) for the next-generation of cloud computing. This has given me a perspective on how important these products are and also made me realize the importance of my role.

I was hired to manage the sample code arena for developers and system administrators that make up the majority of VMware developer community. My biggest goal here is to make your life easier. Yes!, by creating a community based sample code site where it will be easy to create, collect and share sample codes in one single straight forward page.

Some people have started adding scripts to this new section of the community already, take a look and contribute!

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/codecentral
http://blogs.vmware.com/codecentral/

Change the license server from the Service Console

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Got a question today on how to change the licensing server from the Service Console or how to add the license server via a scripted install. Of course “vmware-vim-cmd” is the keyword here. If you want to use a license server you will need to use the first option, if you want to add a license file you will need to use the second option:

  1. vmware-vim-cmd vimsvc/license --source server
  2. vmware-vim-cmd vimsvc/license --source file

Don’t you just love “vmware-vim-cmd”….

Check if your license server is still running…

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After I wrote the licensing server post a couple of days back one of my colleagues(Thanks Horst!) was so kind to email me the following script. What it basically does is check every server for the availability of the license source. Of course it can be improved by adding for instance a check to see if the license service is running on the license server and for instance email the results if there’s an error… [Read more…] about Check if your license server is still running…