PowerShell Friday: Using the Cisco ACI API
One of the great things of all network virtualization solutions, is that they can be automated using some form of API that they publish. Cisco ACI is no different and offers a RESTful API which you can consume to do stuff on the network. Well,…
PowerShell Friday: Load PowerCLI from your own script
When you want to start your PowerCLI scripts or just use the cmdlets for VMware, you can start VMware vSphere PowerCLI from your start menu. From the window you get you can use all PowerCLI cmdlets that you need or your own scripts. But what if…
PowerShell Friday: Retrieving IP addresses for VMs
As I explained in the article about ExtensionData each VM object has a lot of information stored. If you want to know the IP addresses of a particular VM you can use PowerCLI to get those properties. You can get the IP addresses for VMs…
PowerShell Friday: ExtensionData
Did you know that VMware stores a lot of information about your virtual machines? And that you can retrieve all that data with PowerCLI? When you retrieve an object from vCenter or your ESXi host you get a lot of information. When you use Get-VM…
PowerShell Friday: Configuring vSphere MTU Size
Several vSphere components can benefit from using a larger network frame size (MTU) than the regular size of 1500 bytes. vMotion, Storage: NFS, iSCSI and VSAN are examples that would gain some performance by increasing the frame size. In most cases, you would configure the…
PowerShell Friday: Creating Virtual Machines
One of the most basic things you will do within a virtual infrastructure is creating virtual machines. Adding one new virtual machine like this is fine, but if you have to repeat this proces multiple times it might be more usefull to use a script…
PowerShell Friday: Enabling SSH with PowerCLI
Even if you have all the graphic tools that you want to manage your virtual environment, sometimes you still want to use command line utilities for maximum control or for something that isn’t really supported. There are more than one way to enable SSH on…
PowerShell Friday: Copying files with Copy-VMGuestFile
Every now and then you can run into the situation that you have a file wich needs to be distributed to any number of virtual machines. Now you could logon to these servers and copy the file manually and for maybe a handfull of virtual…
PowerShell Friday: Setting Reservations with PowerCLI
When configuring your virtual machines sometimes you want to set reservations. Like I said in the article about adding memory: You can go into the vSphere Client to change the configuration, but where is the fun in that? Why not do everything from the command line? And preferably…
PowerShell Friday: Christmas Special
Tomorrow is Christmas, so this post is a day early, but I wanted to give you something you can play with when you’re done eating, drinking and getting merry. That’s the reason I won’t be giving you PowerShell or PowerCLI scripts that have anything to do…
PowerShell Friday: Adding Memory with PowerCLI
Just before the holidays we’ve got a small PowerCLI onliner for you. Nothing fancy, but still useful. There are times that your virtual machine doesn’t have enough memory. Yes, you can go into the vSphere Client to change the memory configuration, but where is the fun…
PowerShell Friday: Adding CPU’s with PowerCLI
Sometimes you need to add CPUs to your virtual machines. Adding CPU’s is easy on a virtual machine. Of course you can do this from the vSphere Client, where you can select the number of CPUs and the number of cores per CPU. If you…
PowerShell Friday: Snapshots
Virtual machine snapshots are useful for sysadmins, since they preserve the state of a virtual machine’s virtual disk and, optionally, virtual memory before upgrading an application for example. VM Snapshots are also taken by a lot of backup applications for VMs at the start of the backup and…
PowerShell Friday: stopping VMs
This weeks PowerShell Friday is about stopping VMs with PowerCLI. If you want to gracefully shutdown your VM, which I think you will do most of the time you are better of using Shutdown-VMGuest . This will use the VMware tools to gracefully shutdown your VM. Just as…
PowerShell Friday: Starting VMs
With PowerCLI you can manage and automate your VMware infrastructure from the command line. After you connect to vCenter you can do all kinds of nifty stuff. For example it is very easy to start virtual machines. You can use the complete name of the VM,…
