Recently released on the PowerCLI site there has been an updated version of the PowerCLI Poster, this time the PowerCLI Documentation and Engineering teams have done a great job of updating it into a readable poster and have even added my quick reference guide to it to make it an awesome document.

Included in this poster you will not only find every cmdlet collated into some nice readable sections but also code examples and further PowerCLI and PowerShell resources, download the pdf from below:

PowerCLI 4.1 Poster and Quick Reference Guide is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

A few times in PowerGUI or generally I have needed the user to select a single entity so that I can use this entity further in the code to narrow down the output, with this in mind i created a quick PrimalForms form which can be used as a function and a single object selected, the below code can be used within GUI apps like PowerGUI or vEcoShell or just from the powershell prompt.

For example if you wanted to select just the VMs from one host you could present the user a nice GUI with all the hosts added to the dropdown box with the following simple code:

# Send the Hosts to the GUI function
Select-GUIObject "Host" (Get-VMHost)
# Get the VMs for the selected host
$SelObj | Get-VM | Out-GridView

So the GUI box presented from the Select-GUIObject would look like so:

Once the host was selected and the OK button was pressed the VMs would be returned in $selObj and a list of VMs can be gained as in the next line of code and the following output from Out-Gridview:

Other examples of this function can be used with Get-VM or Get-Datastore or whatever you like, this is one of the areas I have spoken to the people at Quest and I believe they may be making some improvements to PowerGUI & vEcoShell to make input easier.

The code:

Function Select-GUIObject ($ObjName, $Object) {
	#Generated Form Function
	function GenerateForm {
	########################################################################
	# Code Generated By: SAPIEN Technologies PrimalForms (Community Edition) v1.0.7.0
	# Generated By: Alan Renouf (http://virtu-al.net)
	########################################################################

	#region Import the Assemblies
	[reflection.assembly]::loadwithpartialname("System.Windows.Forms") | Out-Null
	[reflection.assembly]::loadwithpartialname("System.Drawing") | Out-Null
	#endregion

	#region Generated Form Objects
	$form1 = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Form
	$button1 = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Button
	$label1 = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Label
	$comboBox1 = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox
	$InitialFormWindowState = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.FormWindowState
	#endregion Generated Form Objects

	#----------------------------------------------
	#Generated Event Script Blocks
	#----------------------------------------------
	#Provide Custom Code for events specified in PrimalForms.
	$button1_OnClick=
	{
	$global:SelObj = $comboBox1.SelectedItem
	$form1.close()
	}

	$handler_label2_Click=
	{
	}

	$OnLoadForm_StateCorrection=
	{#Correct the initial state of the form to prevent the .Net maximized form issue
		$form1.WindowState = $InitialFormWindowState

		$Object | Foreach {
			$comboBox1.items.add($_)
			$comboBox1.SelectedIndex=0
		}
		$Combobox1.visible = $true
		$label1.visible = $true
		$button1.visible = $true
		$form1.Text = "Please select a $ObjName"
	}

	#----------------------------------------------
	#region Generated Form Code
	$form1.AutoScaleMode = 0
	$form1.Text = "Please wait loading $ObjName...."
	$form1.Name = "form1"
	$form1.DataBindings.DefaultDataSourceUpdateMode = 0
	$System_Drawing_Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size
	$System_Drawing_Size.Height = 66
	$System_Drawing_Size.Width = 392
	$form1.ClientSize = $System_Drawing_Size
	$form1.FormBorderStyle = 1

	$form1.Controls.Add($InfoLabel)

	$button1.TabIndex = 2
	$System_Drawing_Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size
	$System_Drawing_Size.Height = 23
	$System_Drawing_Size.Width = 75
	$button1.Size = $System_Drawing_Size
	$button1.Name = "button1"
	$button1.UseVisualStyleBackColor = $True

	$button1.Visible = $False
	$button1.Text = "OK"
	$System_Drawing_Point = New-Object System.Drawing.Point
	$System_Drawing_Point.X = 300
	$System_Drawing_Point.Y = 21
	$button1.Location = $System_Drawing_Point

	$button1.DataBindings.DefaultDataSourceUpdateMode = 0
	$button1.add_Click($button1_OnClick)

	$form1.Controls.Add($button1)

	$label1.TabIndex = 1
	$label1.Font = New-Object System.Drawing.Font("Microsoft Sans Serif",8.25,1,3,1)
	$System_Drawing_Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size
	$System_Drawing_Size.Height = 23
	$System_Drawing_Size.Width = 50
	$label1.Size = $System_Drawing_Size
	$label1.Name = "label1"
	$label1.Visible = $False
	$label1.Text = "$ObjName:"
	$System_Drawing_Point = New-Object System.Drawing.Point
	$System_Drawing_Point.X = 8
	$System_Drawing_Point.Y = 26
	$label1.Location = $System_Drawing_Point

	$label1.DataBindings.DefaultDataSourceUpdateMode = 0

	$form1.Controls.Add($label1)

	$System_Drawing_Point = New-Object System.Drawing.Point
	$System_Drawing_Point.X = 64
	$System_Drawing_Point.Y = 21
	$comboBox1.Location = $System_Drawing_Point
	$comboBox1.Visible = $False
	$comboBox1.DataBindings.DefaultDataSourceUpdateMode = 0
	$comboBox1.FormattingEnabled = $True
	$comboBox1.Name = "comboBox1"
	$comboBox1.TabIndex = 0
	$System_Drawing_Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size
	$System_Drawing_Size.Height = 21
	$System_Drawing_Size.Width = 217
	$comboBox1.Size = $System_Drawing_Size

	$form1.Controls.Add($comboBox1)

	#endregion Generated Form Code

	#Save the initial state of the form
	$InitialFormWindowState = $form1.WindowState
	#Init the OnLoad event to correct the initial state of the form
	$form1.add_Load($OnLoadForm_StateCorrection)

	#Show the Form
	$form1.ShowDialog()| Out-Null

	} #End Function

	#Call the Function
	GenerateForm
}

Connect-VIServer myvcenter.mydomain.com

Select-GUIObject "VM" (Get-VM)
Write-host "You Selected $SelObj"

Select-GUIObject "Datastore" (Get-Datastore)
Write-host "You Selected $SelObj"

# Send the Hosts to the GUI function
Select-GUIObject "Host" (Get-VMHost)
# Get the VMs for the selected host
$SelObj | Get-VM | Out-GridView

Simple PowerShell selection box is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!”, Luc and myself started writing a PowerCLI book.
At about the same time I got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist, how could I turn that down !

Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free, I have been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and travelling all over the globe.  The little time I did have spare was spent at home with my family.

As a consequence, our chapter-writing schedule failed miserably, something which I am ashamed of as Luc is doing a fantastic job.

And now, for the proverbial “silver lining”, have a look who agreed to help us out:

Glenn Sizemore Winner of the Scripting Games 2010 and vExpert	Jonathan Medd Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP)	Arnim van Lieshout vExpert

In other words, the book will be now be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” !

Can’t wait to read it

PowerCLI Book Update is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

Recently at the London VMware User Group I gave an additional presentation on top of the normal PowerCLI session I normally provide (which was interactive this time and I think worked very well).

The subject of this session was “Why EMC for VMware”, I have had a number of questions from people who know that I have joined EMC and I wanted to address these and show exactly what EMC is doing when it comes to VMware, one thing I didn’t know about EMC before joining them was how tight they actually integrate both their software and hardware product ranges into VMware and vCenter, making both the life of the virtual admin and the storage admin (I know most of us are now both) 100 times better.

During the presentation Simon Seagrave (fellow vSpecialist and blogger) and I gave an overview of some of the EMC products and how they can make your life easier, just one good example of this is using the EMC Plugins for vCenter – strangely out of 2/3 of the room who said they were EMC customers only a few had tried these.

Using these plugins can make both the VMware admin and Storage admin start communicating together and understanding each others language – think of the universal communicator they use in StarTrek, now when the storage admin is talking to the VMware admin about LUNs and RAID levels, what used to be a glazed look will instantly be translated into datastores and performance !

Check out the below slides or Chad’s great post explaining the plugins in detail which can be found here.

Also the much requested PDF can be downloaded by clicking on the image below:

Another great area of upcoming integration described at the VMUG was VAAI, this is a great new feature of 4.1 and in my opinion the way things should be done, no longer is VMware trying to perform the complex storage related tasks but they are passing these off to the array, which knows how to do these tasks multiple times faster than the ESX host and will also allow the CPU cycles and memory that would have been used by the host to be freed up and used for more important things like running VMs.

Again for more detail make sure you check out the below slide deck and yet another of Chad’s great posts here.

As the people at the VMUG know, not only did we overrun but we also rushed through many of these slides and I had to cut these down, far too much cool information to share and not enough time !  I didn’t even get a chance to mention the RSA products and the amazing work they are doing !

If you do have any follow up questions please feel free to ask and in the meantime I hope you find the below slide deck informative.

http://virtu-al.net/Downloads/WhyEMC-LondonVMUG.pdf

Normal PowerCLI blogging will be maintained momentarily……

Why EMC for VMware is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

I have been given my normal resident slot at the London VMUG this Thursday, 15th July.

At the last VMUG I showed how vEcoShell could be used to add the graphical interface back onto our PowerCLI scripts and also gave an overview of the “VMware Community PowerPack”, when performing the demo I showed how easy it was to drill down into an object using the debugger in the script editor.

Someone asked me if next time I would give more tips and tricks like this, the kind of tips you pick up without realising it and are really helpful to people starting to learn PowerCLI.

So this time there will be a change in the way my session is presented…. We are going to get interactive !

If you are attending my PowerCLI session at the VMUG this Thursday 11-12, please bring along the following equipment:

• Laptop, Windows is preferable but if you have to use one of them Mac things please make sure you have a Windows VM.
• Pre-install Windows PowerShell V2
• Pre-Install PowerCLI 4.0 U1
• Pre-Install vEcoShell and vEcoShell Script editor.

I will bring these on a USB stick also but it will help if you are already setup and raring to go !

My plan is to host a ESX host and a vCenter VM and a few other VMs which we can all hook into and mess with, we can all do the same things and learn at the same time, I will have some mini instructions to follow which will help you along the path – think of this as a free PowerCLI course !

We will start off slow and then I will ask you to do a few things on your own, just to keep you awake.

Hopefully it will go down without a hitch, if you are unable to bring your laptop don’t worry I will try and put you in a group with other people so we can all observe and work together.

See you on Thursday and please remember your laptop !

London VMUG – Thu 15 July – Lets get interactive ! is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

Whilst at the last UK VMware User Group I was talking to someone who advised his PowerCLI prompt took a long time to initialise, he had the latest version (4.0 U1) and the latest version of PowerShell (V2), this is a problem I had seen before and especially when your computer is not attached to the internet and you start PowerCLI.

Symptom: The PowerShell prompt starts straight away but PowerCLI does not, if you start PowerShell normally and then add the PowerCLI snap-in it takes a good minute or so before returning back to the prompt and being ready for action.

Fix:  I had come across this before on the PowerCLI forum where someone had this exact issue and had advised us how to fix it, I thought I would blog it here, especially for him but also for the other people reading this blog and suffering with the slow start-up of PowerCLI.

Here is how to fix it:

1.  Start Internet Explorer

2.  Go to the Tools menu

3.  Go to Internet Options

4.  Go to the Advanced tab and uncheck “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation” so there is no tick in the box.

Result: PowerCLI will now start faster, especially if you are not online or behind a proxy server.

Speed up PowerCLI is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

This may not be news to some of you as I have mentioned it at both the Dutch VMUG and the London VMUG but anyway, if you were not lucky enough to make it to these because you live in a far away place then please read on…

The Virtu-Al PowerPack is no more – gone, dead and buried – RIP

However, the “VMware Community PowerPack” has arrived ! Yes it is a rename but also there is new content and a whole lot more to come, to give this the justice it needs I have created a landing page for the PowerPack at the top of my site under featured scripts or click here.

On the landing page you can see how to download it, a video showing how to install it and also how you can get involved in making it even more useful – Come on people we are all managing the same VMware software here !

Don’t worry if you don’t have scripting skills, you can still get involved !

And with great people like the below already adding content it is destine for great things !

Head over to the landing page http://www.virtu-al.net/featured-scripts/vmware-powerpack/ and check out the “VMware Community PowerPack” now !

Goodbye Virtu-Al – Hello Community is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

The voting is nearly over for this years VMworld Sessions but I thought I would let you know that Luc Dekens (Lucd.info) and I have a session which you can help become a reality just by spending a few moments clicking on a button, if you have ever used a script by Luc and I and wondered how you could pay us back for the time we have spent (Cheques/cash/beer tokens are very welcome) then please hit the button now and come say Hi if you are at VMworld too !

A brief summary of the session

In larger organisations administrating a vSphere environment can cause headaches.

Some of the burning questions you surely recognize

• Who gave that VM 4 CPU’s ?
• Who connected the NIC to the DMZ PortGroup and when ?

In this session, Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf will show you how to automate the answers to these questions with the help of PowerCLI.  The solutions presented will show you how the combined strengths of the rich PowerShell command set and the PowerCLI snapin provide you with powerful tools to make this all happen.

Alan and Luc will show you how to take PowerCLI beyond the listing and reporting stage. They will show you how to write and use scripts that will inform you when problems actually.

This session will show several aspects of working with PowerCLI. The classic PowerCLI approach but also the use of the SDK methods when execution speed is required and the use of third party products like PowerGUI, PowerWF or Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to integrate the solutions even better into the corporate environment.

Luc and Alan will show several practical demos to highlight this integration. One of the demos will show for example how easy it is to use Active Directory to find a users email address and send him a message to tell him that his guest is using too many snapshots. If the mail stays unread, the script can try to reach the user via a Tweet.

How do I vote ?

1.  Go to http://www.vmworld.com/ and login (free regestration), next click the “Vote Today” button as below:

2.  Click on “Technology and Architecture” from the side menu as below:

3.  Click the Vote next to “PowerCLI is for administrators !”

4. Relax knowing the VMware world is a better place and that you helped to make it that way !

VMWorld: PowerCLI is for administrators ! is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

A little while back I started a PowerPack which could be used in either PowerGUI or vEcoShell – the application formerly known as “The Virtualisation EcoShell or VESI, my PowerPack was a collection of the most used scripts from my site all laid out in a nice GUI format.

Now why would you put a GUI back on top of the scripting, lets think about this…

At the moment when you are using the vSphere client to update your virtual infrastructure it is as slow as the human that is driving it, if you want to create 10 virtual machines you will need to click over 50 times (roughly 5 times per VM) and also type the names in etc etc.

If we were to use PowerCLI to do this then we could do it in one-line:

Foreach ($i in 1..10) { Get-VMHost ESX01.virtual.net | New-VM -Name "Newvm$i” -DiskMB 1024 -MemoryMB 512 } 

The difference here is not what it is doing as it is still creating 10 VMs, still connecting to the same vCenter and still using the same API’s as the client its just an automated way of making the call, a programmatic way of sending many calls down the same line to the vCenter.

So why would we use vEcoShell or PowerGUI ?

Well believe it or not coding doesn’t come easy to some people, yeah I know its hard to grasp isnt it !

At the end of the day we all want the benefits of PowerCLI, we love the fact that it makes things easier but not all of us have the time or the mind set to be able to sit down and write a script to automate what they need, of course with such a great book coming out in the future these people will realise just how easy it can be to do this but in the meantime that’s where I see vEcoShell or PowerGUI fitting in, it not only allows me (and other script writers) to share the scripts we have written in a nice easy GUI format with the script still available to browse but also it helps beginners use the same tools the advanced scripter’s would use in a nice easy point and click fashion.

If you haven’t tried vEcoShell or PowerGUI, I would head straight over to there sites and download the free products, its amazing the amount of time you will save and for no cost !

Extended with the VMware Community PowerPack (more to come on this) you will have all the common issues and pain point areas in one management area, for example…

List all VM’s disk partitions and sizes and export them to many formats to forward them on….

Or backup all your ESXi hosts configuration in one click:

Plus much much more, and remember its FREE !

Why vEcoShell or PowerGUI makes sense is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.

Yes I am lucky enough to be attending EMC World for the first time from this Monday until Thursday but what about those people who are not able to afford the trip, well don’t worry, you can still enjoy the buzz and excitement of EMC World.  How ?

Live broadcasting will be in place so everyone will be able to share the announcements and the fun no matter what the location !

The current schedule of events shows key speakers such as Chad Sakac, Steve Herrord, Chris Carrier and more !

The broadcast will be LIVE from 2:30pm-5:30pm Eastern Time (GMT – 4.00) on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and can be seen on http://siliconANGLE.com/emcworld2010.

Make sure you check out the site above and join in the fun and also check the following blog for more information and updates: http://blogstu.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/emc-world-live/

You can be at EMC World is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of "vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization" - Buy your copy today from the USA, Europe or on PDF.