vSphere PowerCLI Blog

There’s been a lot of PowerCLI-related stuff going on lately that’s worth checking out.

vProfiles and more.

Monsieur Alan Renouf has been hard at work lately and had turned out some really amazing stuff. The first is what he calls vProfiles. From the looks of it, vProfiles is still in a fairly early stage, but right now it is able to duplicate virtual switch and portgroup information between two ESX hosts via a graphical interface. Alan also posted a video showing the script in action.

vProfiles from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.

This looks really exciting and Alan is looking to improve its functionality over time to include more than just networking. Chances are it’s also very easy to extend this to apply a configuration to an entire cluster rather than just a single host, and I think we’ll see that ability pop up in the near future.

Another really cool script Alan wrote recently was SnapReminder. SnapReminder will automatically generate an email nag to anyone who has left a snapshot sitting around too long. The most notable thing about SnapMinder in my opinion is that it blends together information from VMware vSphere and Active Directory in a completely seamless way. As if that weren’t enough there are some other great scripts Alan wrote between these two that are also worth checking out.

vWire.

vWire is a new product from the people who brought us Tripwire (some of us feel old when we think about the first time we used Tripwire.) Anyway, the vWire team has taken some of this knowhow and have produced a tool to monitor and analyze your VMware environment, and keep it running smoothly.

vWire has some videos that can help you get started, particularly their getting started video. vWire also offers some really powerful, SQL-based searching capabilities. You may be wondering what this has to do with PowerCLI, but vWire supports script actions, which let you run PowerCLI scripts to do things like display log files or change ESX host configuration. You can see all their content in their content library.

vWire lists for $295 per CPU + Support, and if you’ve got more than a very basic Virtual Infrastructure vWire might a great addition to your portfolio of management tools.

Lastly, but not leastly, PowerWF Studio.

I blogged about PowerWF Studio a while back on the VMware VIX blog, but since then they have also released support for PowerCLI. PowerWF Studio is a graphical workflow builder built on Windows Workflow Foundation

There are a lot of great PowerWF videos on YouTube but one of the best ones right now shows you you can take a PowerShell script you have already written and embed it in a workflow. If you’ve ever visited our communities, or read PowerCLI blogs you know that there are hundreds of really useful scripts out there that solve myriads of problems. With PowerWF it’s now easy to embed these in workflows.

As PowerWF continues to add more actions and adds the ability to talk to more and more software products it should be a tool worth watching.

Steven Murawski and Scott Herold will be talking PowerShell and PowerCLI tomorrow at the Wisconsin VMware Users Group and it should be quite an interesting talk. You can find all the details on Steven’s blog. A recording will also be available after the fact just in case you’re not able to make it.

If you managed to make it to VMworld Europe this year, you may have seen me talking about VI Toolkit, along with my colleague Andrey Anastasov and also Dennis Zimmer, CTO of Icomasoft. Icomasoft has a really cool product that allows you to automate using PowerCLI / VI Toolkit from directly inside VMware’s VI Client, as opposed to using a separate command window. A lot of people really appreciate the added structure and control this gives. Not only that, but PowerScripter also gives you integrated scheduling, something that can be quite tricky to get right.

Icomasoft’s PowerScripter reached version 1.5 recently, and adds experimental support for vSphere 4 as well as enhanced reporting capabilities that let you filter, sort, search and export to Excel. Check out all the details on Icomasoft’s site.

Just a short note to all you VI Toolkit / PowerCLI users out there that Hal Rottenberg’s book, Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell is now shipping, order your copy today!

Hal’s book is full of great tips, tricks and useful samples that will help you learn and use PowerCLI to manage and automate your virtual infrastructure. In fact you can download all those samples right now over at the publisher’s website.

And also, congratulations to Hal, all the hard work has finally paid off!

Kirk Munro and crew have been working hard on a new VMware PowerGUI PowerPack

The best new feature is the ability to draw diagrams of your VI environment, like the one here:

To get some diagram goodness, you need to have vCenter, VI Toolkit 1.5, the latest PowerGUI and PowerPack, and Visio 2007. Once you’ve got all that in order you can create some great diagrams of your virtual environment. I saw a demo of this stuff at VMworld Europe courtesy of Scott Herold and it was really amazing. Note that to generate reports you need to select either a cluster or a datacenter within PowerGUI.

I also wanted to say that Kirk, Scott and all the others at Quest that they’re doing a wonderful job and I’m really looking forward to seeing all this stuff come together when the Virtualization EcoShell launches later this month.