powercli

Function to convert VMs from thin to thick using #PowerCLI & #PowerShell

Most people want to go from thick to thin to save space. I, on the other hand, want to convert my VMs from thin to thick. Thin provisioning buys you time, basically, but what do you do when you’re vastly over provisioned and your VMs are filling up available physical storage? Sure, you can manually go to each VM and use the GUI to migrate them and convert each one to thick. I had a couple hundred that were thin provisioned and needed them converted to thick.

I’ve been moving from 500GB LUNs to 1TB LUNs, so I scripted it out to migrate VMs over, as well as convert to thick using the New-Object cmdlet.

NetApp SnapMirror & RDMs – Automated failover

A few months ago, a reader by the name of Tolga ŞENTEKİN came across This Post looking for something to do a little more. Tolga was looking to script out DR for some VMs he has that use NetApp with & without RDMs. He & I spent about three weeks putting a script together to do the following:

Breaks snapmirror replication
Creates flexclones of the replicated volumes (given you’re licensed for it)
Map them to the esx hosts on the disaster recovery site
Adds and resignatures the LUNs and adds the VMs inside them to the inventory
After that, if you have RDM LUNs attached to the VMs, you first remove the old RDM Mappings from the VM and add the actual LUNs in the disaster site with the same LunID’s
If it’s all done you can start the Vm’s in the disaster site.

Tolga wrote the vast majority of the script, with me only contributing some of the datastore, LUN, & iSCSI stuff.

I uploaded it and have provided a link, since I didn’t want it to get sauteed up from a C&P.

Click HERE to download a copy of the script (right-click, save-as). Obviously, you will need to edit & fine tune for your environment, but he & I wanted to share with the community.

Script to export VMs with thin provisioned disks to CSV file

I wanted to know how many disks in our environment are thin provisioned, so I wrote a quick function to export that list to a CSV file.

I have it pull the VM name, vmdk path & name, Size in GB, and if it’s Thin Provisioned (Boolean, which should always be true).

Function to list all VMs with Snapshots

Using the PowerGUI, you can list all snapshots, but unfortunately, it doesn’t list the parent VM.

I wrote a quick little function to search all VMs that have snapshots and list them.

Create new role & user on ESXi host via PowerCLI & PowerShell

In this post I talked about automated deployment that launches the remote console for me. Since I had 24 hosts that need the user & role, I created a script that does it for me. Nothing special, just something quick that works…

Automated deployment script builds VM, registers in SCCM

This is a follow-up to my last post about fully automated deployment

Below is the script. After it pulls the information from you, it creates the VM, adds the second disk, sleeps for 15 seconds, pulls the MAC from the new VM, creates the computer object in SCCM, adds it to the collection, sleeps for 15 seconds, refreshes the collection, sleeps for 15 seconds, then powers on the VM. If you’ve got a mandatory OSD advertised to the collection specified, and the OSD is fully automated, it will lay down the OS and the computername will be the name you provided to the script.

PowerCLI + VMware + SCCM = sweetness, aka automated deployment

So I’m creating a script that builds a VM for you, imports the NetBIOS name & MAC address into SCCM, adds it to a specific collection, and then powers on the VM. If you have a mandatory OS Deployment for that collection, you don’t have to do anything but sit back and watch (given your Task Sequence is fully automated).

It prompts you for vCenter name, VM name, cpu, ram, description, disk size, queries vcenter for clusters, networks, datastores (sorted by free space), and verifies with you before building…

I’m excited & pleased that it’s actually working. It’s currently proprietary to my work environment, but I will try to strip all that out and let you change what needs to be changed to use it where you like.

Happy Scripting!!!

Script I needed to get info for multiple VMs = Get-VMInfo.ps1

I’ve recently had a ton of requests for information about specific VMs. They want to know how many disks they have, CPU count, how much RAM, and which environment the VM resides in.

Instead of constantly searching vCenter, I wrote this quickly during the meeting to query multiple servers.

Script to pull host UUID for VMware PowerCLI

A reader on a previous post asked about pulling host UUIDs, so I wipped together this script.

Usage is like this:
Get-VMHostUUID.ps1 -vmhosts ("host1","host2","host3")or
Get-VMHostUUID.ps1 -vc vcenterserver -container cluster1/folder/dc/etc

ESXi Auto configuration script

Lets face it, repetition sucks. When provisioning ESX hosts, using such things as the EDA make life easier, but it only does so much for ESXi.

The install for ESXi is simple and straight forward, but when done, you have to go and set everything else (IP, hostname, DNS, local users, etc…). Doing this for 20 hosts could be a PITA (Pain In The A..), so I set out on writing a script that does all of this for you.

All you have to do is set the IP & root password, then verify you can ping the host by it’s hostname (set host/A record in DNS). Once that’s verified, here’s what the script does for you:

Creates an Admins group and assigns it to the Administrator role
Creates local users, sets their default password, and adds them to the Admins group
Sets primary & secondary NTP & DNS servers
Sets DNS search suffix
Combines the provided hostname with DNS search suffix to populate the hostname FQDN
Sets EnableNaviReg to 0, disabled (requested by my storage team)
Disables iSCSI (disabled by default, but enabled in my sd image I created from previous post, thus the need to disable)
Disabled Tech Support Mode, aka ‘unsupported’ console

This is a slightly more advanced script, and it’s not fully polished, but works.