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Archive for August, 2011

What’s new in VMware vSphere PowerCLI 5.0

August 25th, 2011 No comments

Today’s the day that vSphere 5 has officially been released.  There are going to be a million other blog posts talking at length about the full release of vCenter, ESXi, new licensing etc. so I’ll avoid repeating what everyone else is saying.

However, as part of the vSphere 5 release, vSphere PowerCLI 5.0 has also been released and since the vSphere 5 announcement, I haven’t noticed anything written as yet about the new PowerCLI. VMware is consolidating their API

vSphere PowerCLI 5.0 can be downloaded from here.

The changelog has a detailed list of all the changes but it’s probablky a little easier to see the Release Notes:

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SRM for free with PowerCLI & DataONTAP– Part 1: NFS

August 16th, 2011 1 comment

I’ve blogged before on how you can use PowerCLI to replicate some of the functionality of VMware’s SRM to easily recover VMs in a business recovery site with replicated storage.

In my previous post I had only looked at the VMware side of the automation and so it’s time for an update to include the important part of handling the underlying storage. I’m going to use NetApp storage as an example but any storage vendor that exposes their API to Powershell can be used if you can find the relevant commands.

This is where the awesomeness of Powershell really comes into its own when you can combine automation for both VMware and NetApp in a single script.

You will obviously need both PowerCLI and Netapp’s DataONTAP installed. See my previous post: Pimping your Powershell Profile for getting everything installed.

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Adding .VMX Files to vCenter Inventory with PowerCLI gets even easier

August 11th, 2011 10 comments

Update: I’ve since found out that mattboren actually found out about this before me and posted something on the VMware communities which I missed. Well found Matt.

A fairly common request is to be able to register existing VMs in a datastore in the vCenter inventory.

This can be a life saver if you have had storage issues and have had to present a backup copy of a datastore which has a different name and need to add the VMs to the inventory, a very laborious process if done manually with right-click Add to Inventory.

This can also be useful in a business recovery process when you need to add VMs that have been mirrored by storage replication over to a secondary site and you need to add them into your inventory.

PowerCLI guru, Luc Dekens has developed a fantastic script called Raiders of the Lost VMX which searches a datastore for .VMX files, and adds them to the vCenter inventory. This script has been updated over the years with even more clever functionality.

Adding the VM to the inventory involved running the RegisterVM_Task Method against the VM Folder in VC.

By accident I discovered there’s actually an updated easier way to add existing VMs to the inventory if you have the .VMX file path. I’m not sure when this was added to PowerCLI but I found it when writing a script to add a new VM.

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New Broadcom bnx2x 1.64 driver released for ESX(i) 4.1 but it’s not supported with HP Flex-10

August 10th, 2011 8 comments

VMware has released a new Broadcom bnx2x Nic Driver for ESX(i) 4.1 which is used in HP blades for the HP NC532 Nics.
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esxi40_broadcom_bcm_netxtreme/ZHcqYnQlZXBiZGgqag

The new version is 1.64.32.v41.1

I’ve had confirmation from Rotem Agmon, a VMware Technical Consultant at HP that this new driver is not supported by HP.

The currently supported Update Manager driver friendly versions are:
ESX(i) 4.0 – 1.62.11.v40.1
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esxi40_broadcom_bcm57xxx/ZHcqYnR0d3BiZGVqdA==

ESX(i) 4.1  – 1.62.15.v41.2
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esx41_broadcom_netxtremeii_032311/ZHcqYnR0anBiZGhwZA==

My Flex-10 ESX(i) pre-requisites post has all the driver and firmware required versions.

Categories: ESX, Flex-10, HP Tags: , , , , ,

NetApp PowerShell Toolkit, DataONTAP 1.5 released

August 4th, 2011 No comments

NetApp has updated it’s Powershell Toolkit which it calls DataONTAP to version 1.5 (I think PowerONTAP would be a much better name!).

You will need a Netapp NOW account which is available to customers and partners to download the toolkit.
http://communities.netapp.com/community/interfaces_and_tools/data_ontap_powershell_toolkit

There are 27 new cmdlets taking the total up to a massive 528 cmdlets with nearly all possible API’s now covered.

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