vSphere Replication was introduced with vSphere 5.0 and SRM 5.0 providing a way for customers without the ability to leverage storage array replication to utilize Site Recovery Manager (SRM) within their environments as their disaster recovery solution.

With the release of vSphere 5.1 vSphere Replication also became available as a standalone replication solution included with Essentials Plus and higher vSphere license editions. Customers now have the option of deploy vSphere Replication on its own to provide basic per-VM replication for use cases where SRM’s advanced DR orchestration capabilities were not applicable.

As adoption of vSphere Replication is growing amongst the vSphere 5.1 customer base so has the number of requests for ideas, hints and tips on what kind of reporting could be added to provide usage information for the various events that could occur amongst a collection of replicated VM’s.

Some examples would be:

• highlight when a given VM violates its RPO
• detect when the violated RPO state is restored
• compute the time duration for the RPO violation
• collate the total amount of data replicated for a given VM over a given time period

The number of customers asking for this kind of information led to this blog being written and the scripts being created in conjunction with Lee Dilworth who is a Principal Systems Engineer with VMware and SRM expert.

In this initial article we have included some scripts that will provide the administrator with a means to produce a csv file that contains (for each replicated VM) a history of its RPO violations, when they started/ended and how long each lasted.

Working with events

PowerCLI has a great cmdlet which allows us to work with vSphere Events, this means we can programmatically display and export the information we need by finding a list of events which have been produced in vSphere.  This cmdlet is called Get-VIEvent, more information on its usage can be found here.

Retrieving all vSphere Replication events

With our first example, once connected to the source replication vCenter Server in PowerCLI through the Connect-VIServer cmdlet we can easily pull any events which have been generated by vSphere Replication and export them straight into a CSV file onto the current users desktop by using the following One-Liner:

Get-VIEvent -MaxSamples ([int]::MaxValue) | Where { $_.EventTypeId -match "hbr|rpo" } | Select CreatedTime, FullFormattedMessage, @{Name="VMName";Expression={$_.Vm.Name}} | export-csv -NoTypeInformation -Path ([Environment]::GetFolderPath("Desktop") + "\HBR-RPOEvents.csv")

Example formatted output:

Creating the RPO Report

Now we are able to retrieve the event information for RPO events we can format the data to give us exactly what we needed from the report, again this will output a file to the users desktop, make sure you are connected to the source vCenter server and then run this script:

Write-Host "[$(Get-Date)] Retrieving VMs"
$VMs = Get-VM

$Results = @()
Foreach ($VM in $VMs) {
	Write-Host "[$(Get-Date)] Retrieving events for $($VM.name)"
	$Events = Get-VIEvent -MaxSamples ([int]::MaxValue) -Entity $VM
	Write-Host "[$(Get-Date)] Filtering RPO events for $($VM.name)"
	$RPOEvents = $Events | where { $_.EventTypeID -match "rpo" } | Where { $_.Vm.Name -eq $VM.Name } | Select EventTypeId, CreatedTime, FullFormattedMessage, @{Name="VMName";Expression={$_.Vm.Name}} | Sort CreatedTime
	if ($RPOEvents) {
		$Count = 0
		Write-Host "[$(Get-Date)] Finding replication results for $($VM.Name)"
		do {
			$details = "" | Select VMName, ViolationStart, ViolationEnd, Mins
			if ($RPOEvents[$count].EventTypeID -match "Violated") {
				If (-not $details.Start) {
					$Details.VMName = $RPOEvents[$Count].VMName
					$Details.ViolationStart = $RPOEvents[$Count].CreatedTime
					Do {
					$Count++
					} until (($RPOEvents[$Count].EventTypeID -match "Restored") -or ($Count -gt $RPOEvents.Count))
					if ($RPOEvents[$count].EventTypeID -match "Restored") {
						$details.ViolationEnd = $RPOEvents[$Count].CreatedTime
						$Time = $details.ViolationEnd - $details.ViolationStart
						$details.Mins = "{0:N2}" -f $Time.TotalMinutes
					} Else {
						$details.ViolationEnd = "No End Date"
						$details.Mins = "N/A"
					}
				}
			}
			$Results += $details
			$Count++
		} until ($count -gt $RPOEvents.Count)
	}
}
$Results | export-csv -NoTypeInformation -Path ([Environment]::GetFolderPath("Desktop") + "\ViolationReport.csv")

Example formatted output:

-Alan

Reporting on RPO violations from vSphere Replication is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

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Yesterday I finally received my Pebble which I ordered a while back when they were in their Kickstarter phase of “Should we do this?” – I for one am glad they did as it’s a great device!

For those of you who are not aware, a Pebble is a cool watch witch uses Bluetooth to connect to your iPhone or Android phone and allow you to do cool things like…

• Receive vibrating notifications straight to your wrist for most of the apps you would normally receive them from on the phone like Email, Caller ID, SMS, Calendar Alerts, Facebook, Twitter etc etc
• Play retro style games – Remember Snakes on the Nokia (or QBasic before that) and Space invaders, Tetris etc
• App integration with apps such as runkeeper to display your pace, mph, how long you have been running
• Control your music with iTunes and Pandora and other music apps, skip songs, display title and album.
• Specific apps like the 7 Minute workout App
• Use it with If That Then This for further updates

And that’s just the start, there are also some funky watch faces which you can install many of and simply switch between them with the push of one button, the watch faces and a good number of games can be downloaded from http://www.mypebblefaces.com

Also, the design of the watch is very cool, its water resistant so you get a nice magnetized usb charger, apparently the charge lasts for around 7 days because it is made with e-paper.  Its slick and sexy and has a vibrating motor and accelerometer with gesture detection which is used for the light to ensure readability at night when moved.

Check out their site to find out more details or order yours…. http://getpebble.com

My Watch Faces

Of course the first thing I did once my family had stopped sending me “funny” SMS messages just to see them appear on my wrist! was to create a few watch faces of my own, nothing interactive for now but just something cool to switch to at VMUGs or VMworld etc, these were created with an awesome site here:  http://www.watchface-generator.de

>PowerCLI Download here

>VMware Hands On Labs Download here

VMworld 2013 Download here

A slight issue

After receiving my pebble and pairing it with my watch and going through the setup wizard I was receiving SMS and Caller ID fine but was not receiving twitter, calendar notifications, emails and others.  The only way I found to fix this was to go into the notification settings of the iPhone and for each of the items I wanted to receive them for I would disable and re-enable the notifications.  This is a glitch which I’m sure will be fixed in the future but I wanted others not to b as puzzled as I was for a few minutes.

Next Steps

With the Pebble having an API I think it would be cool to come up with an App that allows you to control VMware vSphere using the watch, just thing, instant stats and inventory numbers to your watch, deploy and delete VMs, Snapshots, Power on Power Off all from your watch – Now that would be cool!

-Alan

Cool Tech: Pebble watch is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

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Recently when at the Western Pennsylvania VMUG I was asked by Rob Velarde if I had tried Show-Command with PowerCLI, I know that PowerCLI5.1 R2 now supports PowerShell V3 where the Show-Command cmdlet was introduced so thought I would take a look.

Looking at a cmdlets syntax can be complicated for people who are new to PowerShell and PowerCLI, the below is an example of the New-VM cmdlet…

So what does all this mean?

The mixture of square brackets, angle brackets tell us what is required by a cmdlet and which items are positional, each line shows a separate parameter set (4 in this example), and that’s just the basics!

This can be confusing for people who are learning PowerCLI and just need to get the job done, what do they need to fill out, what are some of the options?

Show-Command

Show-Command is a great way to help people learn PowerCLI and the parameters they need to use for a given cmdlet.  If I use Show-Command with New-VM we are presented with a graphical representation of the input for the New-VM Cmdlet:

Each parameter set is now represented by a new tab in the GUI:

We can easily see the required entries as they are marked with a * and fill out each part of the form to create a new virtual machine.  Another cool feature of Show-Command is that if there are defined values for a parameter these will be listed in a selection box:

And the last cool feature which takes us back to helping the new people learn more is that once you have filled out the GUI you have a couple of options to show what the cmdlet would look like if you ran it at the console.

1. Hit the Copy button and paste it into a script editor or the PowerCLI console to see the fully completed cmdlet with parameters for what you just filled out.

2.  Hit the Run button to submit the command and create the VM, next you can push the up arrow in the PowerCLI console to see the history and what the cmdlet would have looked like if you had not used the GUI, this is a great way of learning!

For example, the following GUI entries

After hitting Run and using the up arrow in the same console (or hitting copy) you would get the following PowerCLI code:

New-VM -Name MyVM1 -Template MyTemplate1 -Datastore MyDatastore1 -DiskStorageFormat Thin -VMHost MyVMHost1

Conclusion

You can see how using Show-Command can help simplify learning the inputs for a cmdlet, this is useful when getting started with PowerCLI (Or PowerShell for that matter) and also helps us understand more about parameter sets and required parameters.

Do you have any other easy ways to help new people learn PowerCLI or PowerShell? Make sure you comment below!

-Alan

Using Show-Command with PowerCLI is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

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I was asked if it was possible to set the VMKernel Nic MTU in PowerCLI, after looking on the internet there were several people showing how to do this but some of them were very complicated, maybe this has got easier over time as with each release of PowerCLI one of the things the PowerCLI Dev team looks at is how to make things easier for the end user?

Anyway, I thought I would show my one line solutions for listing and setting the MTU for the VMKernel Nics for multiple hosts,

Listing the MTU for each VMKernel Nic

Setting the MTU to 9000 for each VMKernel Nic

The Code

Listing the MTU for each VMKernel Nic

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter | Where { $_.GetType().Name -eq "HostVMKernelVirtualNicImpl" } | Select VMHost, Name, MTU

Or an even easier way of doing this (but you cant expand it to change the MTU easily is:

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostNetwork | Select -ExpandProperty VirtualNic | Select VMHost, Name, MTU

Setting the MTU to 9000 for each VMKernel Nic

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter | Where { $_.GetType().Name -eq "HostVMKernelVirtualNicImpl" } | Foreach { $_ | Set-VMHostNetworkAdapter -Mtu 9000 -Confirm:$false }

-Alan

Altering VMKernel NIC MTU with PowerCLI is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

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Recently I was lucky enough to attend the PowerShell Summit at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, this was an awesome event which was focused on PowerShell, it included not only people who are using PowerShell but also some of the people who wrote and designed it.

There were a bunch of great sessions, all of which can be reviewed and slides downloaded here.  I was also asked to present two sessions.  I have included the recordings for these sessions below.  Thanks to Aaron Hoover for recording these.

A couple of comments which I took away from the PowerShell Summit which really surprised me where:

• A number of people told me they had started out with PowerCLI and then worked back into PowerShell (much like myself).
• I was surprised that 2/3 of the room when I presented were using VMware, after all this was a Microsoft Conference!

Overall, this was more of an informal conference which gave it a great feel and encouraged feedback and participation.  The format worked great and I suggest you book for next year as soon as the details are available on PowerShell.org to get your place early.

Session 1

Practical PowerShell – Integration from bare metal to the cloud

Joined by Eric Williams from Cisco I showed how PowerCLI and PowerTool can be used together to create some awesome scripts that take your infrastructure from bare metal to the cloud at the push of a button. As a side note, I may have overrun somewhat on this session so sorry for it being a little fast!

Session 2

Creating a complex and reusable HTML reporting structure

This session shows how vCheck came to be, it also shows how to create your own version of vCheck in about 3 minutes to monitor anything with a PowerShell interface or PowerShell accessible API.

-Alan

PowerShell Summit–My recorded sessions is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

This year there are some awesome sessions at VMworld, I think people are starting to realize the benefits of automation and how these can be achieved with VMware products.  I am looking forward to attending and hopefully presenting some great sessions at VMworld 2013.

Today is the last day of voting so if you are still looking through the session list and wondered what I had put forward this year then please find a list below, if these looks interesting to you then please feel free to vote for it here!

Thanks as always for your votes on my sessions.

-Alan

My VMworld 2013 Sessions is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

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Recently I was asked if we could list some basic information from VMware View using the cmdlets which come installed on the View Administrator server, the request was specifically a list of VMs and the pool they were in, this was easily achieved with the Get-DesktopVM cmdlet as below:

Get-DesktopVM | Select Name, Pool_id | Sort Pool_id

Secondly they were after a list of pools and the number of VMs which were part of these pools, these can be found using a calculated property and a combination of the Get-Pool and Get-DesktopVM cmdlets as below:

Get-Pool | Select Pool_id, @{Name="NumVM";Expression={($_ | Get-DesktopVM).Count}}

-Alan

Gathering simple pool information from VMware View is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

Do you wish you could automate your NetApp Storage infrastructure?

Do you wish your storage admins could give an easy to use custom interface to other areas of the business allowing them to provision or use storage however they need whilst still applying best practice and corporate policies to the configuration?

Do you wish you could do all this at no cost to NetApp customers? If the answer is yes then keep reading.

Recently I was lucky enough to get a demo of NetApp Workflow Automation (WFA) from one of the automation experts at NetApp, to be honest, before this conversation I was only aware of the NetApp PowerShell snap-in and didn’t know they had a tool which could take PowerShell to the next level.

Workflow Automation is NetApp’s latest storage automation product. The goal for WFA is to make the NetApp storage management processes simple and easy. Storage experts can easily define common storage management processes, and make them available for execution by approved users. Storage teams can also achieve end-to-end automation through integration with orchestration engines into other products such as VMware vSphere or VMware vCloud Director.

Essentially you can take your current storage processes for provisioning, migration or decommissioning and automate them using an easy to use graphical interface to a powerful PowerShell back end.

Once they are created you can assign roles to other areas of your company, like VMware admins and present them with a web interface to a simple click through wizard to run the workflow. WFA also includes multiple ways to retrieve data from existing systems like helpdesk or CMDB system.

vSphere/vCloud Director Integration

Imagine being able to give the vSphere admins the ability to carve up their own storage based around the storage admins guidelines, a simple interface to launch this process that not only sets up the storage platform but also goes into vSphere and adds it to each host in the cluster or even takes it up to vCloud Director.

Pre-Built workflows are available to show how to work with vSphere as shown below (download here) :

An example screen of one of the workflows running is below:

And also now for VMware vCloud Director: (download here)

Of course one of my initial questions was, how does this fit in with VMware Orchestrator (vCO)? The answer is that WFA already has an API and can be called by any product wanting to use one of the workflows, this makes tying into vCO very easy.

Where can I get more information?

NetApp have produced some great video’s here, and it looks like more will appear in the future.

The WFA product brief can be viewed here.

Blog posts, articles, sample code and workflows, download links and more can be found on the product home page here: https://communities.netapp.com/community/products_and_solutions/storage_management_software/workflow-automation

Awesome blog on WFA (bookmark it): http://www.virtpirate.com/blog/ written by @virtpirate (follow him)

If you have NetApp storage make sure you check out the product which again is free to NetApp customers.

-Alan

Automating storage with NetApp Workflow Automation is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

I was listening to episode 216 of the PowerScripting Podcast recently, Hal and Jonathan were talking to vCloud Director (vCD) expert Jake Robinson and “meeting expert” (listen it will make sense) Damian Karlson, it was a great show, very funny and I highly recommend you listen here: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/episode-216-jake-robinson-and-damian-karlson-talk-powercli/

Anyway, they were talking about relating vCD objects to vCenter objects, on the show they said it couldn’t be done without matching an ID and writing a custom function, this used to be the case but now I wanted to show a few cool things from PowerCLI which allows us to use a parameter called –RelatedObject to take away all the hard work from the matching IDs, Datastore IDs, Network IDs etc.

Word of warning!

Just so you are aware, whilst VMware do provide a method for relating objects between vCD and vSphere go careful where you use it, whilst you would theoretically be able to get a cloud VM and relate this to a vSphere VM and then go on in your script to alter the VM or do some other kind of action on it I would not do this.  vCD needs to know about the changes you make or you may get strange unsupported results.  Generally I would stick to using this for cool reporting scripts.

RelatedObject Parameter

With the RelatedObject parameter on some of the PowerCLI cmdlets, you can retrieve vSphere inventory objects and vSphere PowerCLI view objects from cloud resources, what’s more is that we even let you pipeline these cmdlets together to get the results. The use of these cmdlets allowing you to relate the information between the two applications allows for automation, reporting, and troubleshooting options for provider administrators and gives us an easy way to retrieve data from both applications in the same interface.  Exactly what PowerShell was designed for!

The list of cmdlets which you can use with this parameter can be seen below, you will also notice that this parameter exists in the VMware Distributed Switch snapin as well:

Of course for these to work you will need to connect to vCenter with the Connect-VIServer cmdlet and in the same session connect to the vCloud Director session with Connect-CIServer, bear in mind that you may have multiple vCenters backing your vCD environment so a connection will need to be made to all of these.

Retrieving vSphere Objects from vCloud Director Resources

Provider administrators can use the RelatedObject parameter of vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets to retrieve vSphere inventory objects from vCloud Director objects. Passing the retrieved objects to the cmdlets of the VMware.VimAutomation.Core and VMware.VimAutomation.VDS snap-ins easily allows for the related object to be returned.

The following table shows which objects are currently supported:

Here is an example of this working:

Retrieving vSphere Views from vCloud Director Views

For the administrators with advanced knowledge and understanding of .NET Framework, vSphere PowerCLI, PowerShell scripting, and vSphere and vCloud APIs or if you are familiar with using the Get-View Cmdlet and Get-CIView Cmdlet you can retrieve vSphere PowerCLI views from vCloud Director PowerCLI views with the Get-CIView and Get-View cmdlets.

The following table shows which supported vSphere views you can retrieve from views:

Here are a few examples of this working:

-Alan

Relating vCloud Director to vCenter in PowerCLI is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

VMware have just released PowerCLI 5.1 R2 and with it are the long awaiting cmdlets to work with VDS!

I worked with these a little and although VDS are not 100% fully covered in this release the cmdlets are certainly useful for most of the things I needed to do and they opened up VDS with the .extensiondata property for the rest of the things I wanted to play with.

Two of the cooler cmdlets where the Export-VDSwitch and New-VDSwitch –backupfile which can be used with 5.1 and the new VDS features to backup the VDS into a simple zip file and re-import it when needed.

I have included the new cmdlets and some examples from the help file below.

As well as the VDS cmdlets I am also happy that VMware now supports PowerShell v3 and vCloud Director 5.1 in both their admin version of PowerCLI and their Tenant version, this opens up vCD to automate some of the cooler new features of VCD and also enable the enhancements made by Microsoft in PowerShell v3.

Download it now.

VDS Cmdlets and their examples

Get-VDSCommand

Lists all the PowerCLI cmdlets available for VDS

Get-VDSCommand

Add-VDSwitchPhysicalNetworkAdapter

Retrieves the specified physical network adapter from the specified host and adds it to the specified distributed switch.

$vmhostNetworkAdapter = Get-VMHost "MyVMHost" | Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter -Physical -Name vmnic2
Get-VDSwitch "MyVDSwitch" | Add-VDSwitchPhysicalNetworkAdapter -VMHostNetworkAdapter $vmhostNetworkAdapter

Add-VDSwitchVMHost

Adds two hosts to the specified distributed switch.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyDistributedSwitch" | Add-VDSwitchVMHost -VMHost "VMHost1", "VMHost2"

Export-VDPortGroup

Exports the configuration of the specified port group to the specified file.

Get-VDPortGroup -Name 'MyVDPortGroup' | Export-VDPortGroup -Destination 'C:\MyVDSwitchesBackup\MyVDPortGroup_21122012.zip'

Exports the configuration of the specified port group to the specified file. If the MyVDSwitchesBackup directory does not exist, it is created. If the MyVDPortGroupBackup.zip file already exists in the specified location, it is overwritten.

$myPortGroup = Get-VDPortGroup -Name 'MyVDPortGroup'
Export-VDPortGroup -VDPortGroup $myPortGroup -Destination 'C:\MyVDSwitchesBackup\MyVDPortGroupBackup.zip' -Force

Export-VDSwitch

Exports the configuration of the specified vSphere distributed switch and its port groups to the specified file.

Get-VDSwitch -Name 'MyVDSwitch' | Export-VDSwitch -Description "My VDSwitch configuration" -Location "c:\myVDSwitchConfig.zip"

Exports the configuration of the specified vSphere distributed switch and its port groups to the specified file. If the myVDSwitchConfig.zip file already exists, it is overwritten.

Get-VDSwitch -Name 'MyVDSwitch' | Export-VDSwitch -Description "My VDSwitch configuration" -Location "c:\myVDSwitchConfig.zip" -WithoutPortGroups -Force

Get-VDPortgroup

Retrieves the distributed port group named “MyVDPortGroup” on the specified vSphere distributed switch.

Get-VDPortGroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" -VDSwitch "MyVDSwitch"

Retrieves the distributed port groups that are related to the specified organization network in the cloud.

Get-OrgNetwork -Name "MyOrgNetwork" | Get-VDPortGroup

Retrieves the distributed port group to which the specified virtual machine network adapter is connected.

Get-NetworkAdapter -Name "MyVMNetworkAdapter" | Get-VDPortGroup

Get-VDSwitch

Retrieves all vSphere distributed switches in the specified datacenter.

Get-Datacenter -Name MyDatacenter | Get-VDSwitch

Retrieves all vSphere distributed switches to which the specified host is added.

Get-VMHost -Name MyVMHost | Get-VDSwitch

Retrieves all vSphere distributed switches to which the specified virtual machine is connected.

Get-VM -Name MyVM | Get-VDSwitch

New-VDPortgroup

Creates a new distributed port group on the specified vSphere distributed switch with the specified number of ports and VLAN ID.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | New-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" -NumPorts 8 -VLanId 4

Creates a new distributed port group on the specified vSphere distributed switch by cloning the configuration of the distributed port group named “MyReferencePortGroup”.

$myReferncePortroup = Get-VDPortgroup -Name "MyReferencePortGroup"
Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | New-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" -ReferencePortgroup $myReferncePortroup

Creates asynchronously a new distributed port group on the specified vSphere distributed switch.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | New-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" -RunAsync

Creates a new distributed port group on the specified vSphere distributed switch by importing the specified backup profile.

$myBackupFilePath = 'c:\Backup.zip'
Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | New-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortgroup" -BakupPath $myBackupFilePath

Creates a new distributed port group on the specified vSphere distributed switch with the specified name and VLAN trunk range settings.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | New-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" -VlanTrunkRange "1-5, 10-20"

New-VDSwitch

Creates a new vSphere distributed switch with the specified name, version, maximum number of ports, and link discovery protocol settings in the specified datacenter.

$myDatacenter = Get-Datacenter -Name "MyDatacenter"
New-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" -Location $myDatacenter -LinkDiscoveryProtocol "LLDP" -LinkDiscoveryProtocolOperation "Listen" -MaxPorts 256 -Version "5.0.0"

Creates a new vSphere distributed switch by cloning the configuration of the existing distributed switch named “MyReferenceSwitch”. The new distributed switch is created without cloning the existing port groups and is stored in the specified folder.

$myFolder = Get-Folder -Name "MyFolder"
Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyReferenceSwitch" | New-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" -Location $myFolder -WithoutPortGroups

Creates a new vSphere distributed switch by importing the specified backup profile.

$myFolder = Get-Folder -Name "MyFolder"
New-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" -Location $myFolder -WithoutPortGroups -BackupPath "c:\MyDistributedSwitchProfile.zip"

Remove-VDPortGroup

Removes the specified distributed port group from the vSphere distributed switch that it belongs to.

Get-VDPortGroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" | Remove-VDPortGroup

Remove-VDSwitch

Removes the specified distributed switch.

Get-VDSwitch -Name MyVDSwitch | Remove-VDSwitch

Remove-VDSwitchPhysicalNetworkAdapter

Removes the specified host physical network adapter from the distributed switch that it is connected to.

Get-VMhost -Name "MyVMhost" | Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter -Physical -Name vmnic0 | Remove-VDSwitchPhysicalNetworkAdapter

Remove-VDSwitchVMHost

Removes two hosts from the specified distributed switch.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MySwitch" | Remove-VDSwitchVMHost -VMHost "VMHost1", "VMHost2"

Set-VDPortgroup

Changes the name, number of ports and the VLAN ID of all distributed port groups named “MyVDPortGroup”.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" | Set-VDPortgroup -Name "MyNewVDPortGroupName" -NumPorts 5 -VlanId 4

Changes the VLAN trunk range of all distributed port groups named “MyVDPortGroup”.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" | Set-VDPortgroup -VlanTrunkRange "1-5, 8-10"

Sets the VLAN type of the specified distributed port group to None.

$myVDPortgroup = Get-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" -VDSwitch "MyVDSwitch"
Set-VDPortgroup -VDPortgroup $myVDPortgroup -DisableVlan

Rollbacks the configuration of all distributed port groups named “MyVDPortGroup”.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" | Set-VDPortgroup -RollbackConfiguration

Reconfigures all distributed port groups named “MyVDPortGroup” by importing the configuration from the specified backup profile.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name "MyVDPortGroup" | Set-VDPortgroup -BackupPath 'c:\backup.zip'

Set-VDSwitch

Modifies the maximum number of ports, the number of uplink ports, and the maximum MTU size of the specified vSphere distributed switch.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | Set-VDSwitch -MaxPorts 1000 -NumUplinkPorts 8 -Mtu 2000

Changes the version of all vSphere distributed switches whose names start with “MyVDSwitch”.

$myVDSwitches = Get-VDSwitch -Name MyVDSwitch*
Set-VDSwitch -VDSwitch $myVDSwitches -Version '5.1.0'

Enables link discovery protocol on the specified vSphere distributed switch, sets it to LLDP and changes the link discovery protocol operation to listen.

$myVDSwitch = Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch"
Set-VDSwitch -VDSwitch $myVDSwitch -LinkDiscoveryProtocol LLDP -LinkDiscoveryProtocolOperation Listen

Reconfigures the specified vSphere distributed switch by importing the specified backup profile. The original port groups are not recreated.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | Set-VDSwitch -BackupPath 'c:\MyVDSwitchBackups\MyVDSwitch_12_12_2012.zip' -WithoutPortGroups

Rollbacks the configuration of the specified vSphere distributed switch to its previous state.

Get-VDSwitch -Name "MyVDSwitch" | Set-VDSwitch -RollbackConfiguration

-Alan

PowerCLI 5.1 R2 Released is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

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