I’ve got a basement finishing project going on which is really important as it gets my temporary office moved back downstairs so that we can have a proper nursery upstairs near our bedroom. In case you haven’t been watching my tweets, my unborn son is in an awful hurry to arrive, so—yikes!.

Anyway, one of the rooms in the basement is to be a media room. While I doubt I’ll have some nice equipment to put into it anytime soon, what with a new baby coming along, I do want to make sure I’ve got the wiring ready before the drywall goes up.

Here’s a rough sketch made with Google SketchUp (which rocks btw):

The plan is to have four satellite speakers (two of which are visible in this picture) in the corners, and then the rest of a 5.1 system located in typical spots around the TV.

I looked locally for the wall jack parts for the speakers but the only places which I found quickly (Lowe’s and Best Buy), really wanted to rip me off and didn’t have that great a selection. Not a big surprise. I asked on Twitter where else to go and I got a couple of great suggestions.  I ended up buying the parts from monoprice.com.

I’ll probably be running the wires and installing wiring boxes tomorrow or this weekend. The finishing parts should arrive mid-week.  I should probably be taking some pictures. 

I hate this window! And it really isn’t much better on Vista. I spent several minutes looking for a single app (old version of PowerShell) this morning so that I could uninstall it and install CTP3. I really want a list that I can filter by partial string. And it takes so long to open!

I know there’s third-party several replacements for it, but I’ve not tried any. Do you have any that you use?

I just wanted to make a quick post to show you how to connect to a VMware Server (version 2 required) with the VI Toolkit.  As Server uses a different default port than VirtualCenter (which uses 443), you must specify it to the Connect-VIServer cmdlet.

PS > $vi = Connect-VIServer magneto -Port 8333
There were one or more problems with the server certificate:

* A certification chain processed correctly, but terminated in a root certificate which isn't trus
ted by the trust provider.

PS > Get-VM
PS > New-VM -Name testvm -MemoryMB 256 -DiskMB 10 -RunAsync

Name                           State      % Complete Start Time   Finish Time
----                           -----      ---------- ----------   -----------
CreateVM_Task                  Running             0 02:07:41 PM

PS > Get-Datastore

Name                               FreeSpaceMB      CapacityMB
----                               -----------      ----------
standard                                 67208           76308

My phone’s been down all day.  I’ve been with Voicepulse for a couple of years and have been pretty heppy.  Their customer service is top notch, actually. I’ve never had an outage like this one before.  Their website was down all day, although it seems to be partially up right now. I just called their office, not expecting it to work—and I was right.

Hopefully it’ll come back soon. I tried searching the blogosphere and nobody seems to have the scoop on what’s going on.

In case you missed PowerScripting Live last night, Jeffrey Snover announced that PowerShell CTP3 was going to have been released today (Dec 19th).  Ewwww, yes, past tense on that one.  Turns out there is a possible showstopper bug that the team is investigating right now. He promised that they’ll be shipping the latest tech preview version of PowerShell as soon as they possibly can.

Update – read to the end, I just got some news on some…limitations.

Update #2 - All API restrictions have been removed with v3.5U3!

Update #3 - false alarm According to Mike D, this was an accident and it’ll be turned off in U4.

Have you checked out VMware’s free ESXi hypervisor yet?  It’s some pretty neat stuff, taking most of the high perf features we know and love from its big brother and wrapping them in a tiny package. It’s a great tool which I’ve started to get into lately (we have an existing VI3 ESX shop).

One thing you cannot do with the free version however, is connect to and manage multiple host systems at the same time.  The VI Client is great, but it’s scope is limited to a single server.  If you happen to have a VirtualCenter, you’ll find that you can’t add an ESXi server to your farm—it fails due to a missing license.

Not all is lost!  Late in the dev cycle of VMware’s VI Toolkit (for Windows), they added a Server parameter to every cmdlet. Let me show you how you can use it to control multiple ESXi servers at once—for free.  You can’t beat free.

PS > $esxi = Connect-VIServer 192.168.0.51,192.168.0.55 -Credential (Get-Credential)

cmdlet Get-Credential at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:
Credential
PS > $esxi

Name                           Port                           User
----                           ----                           ----
192.168.0.51                   443                            root
192.168.0.55                   443                            root

PS > $DefaultVIServer

Name                           Port                           User
----                           ----                           ----
192.168.0.55                   443                            root

PS > (Get-VM | Measure-Object).Count
7
PS > (Get-VM -Server $esxi | Measure-Object).Count
10

Note that if you leave off the Server param, the cmdlets will operate on the most recently-connected server, which will be stored automatically in the $DefaultVIServer variable.

Limitations to Management API in ESXi

I just learned from the product group that most of the objects exposed by the VI API in the free edition are read-only.  This is pretty harsh.  This means your reporting scenarios will still work well, but you can forget about ongoing maintenance. I’ll probably post a follow up to this article once I have a better handle on what you can and can’t do.  Stay tuned.

Update @ 12/14/08 - With version 3.5U3, VMware has thankfuilly decided to remove all API restrictions. See this article.

I hate to write three posts in a row about the book but I’m pretty excited about the early response I’m seeing from others in the community about my book.

• Eric Sloof is going to mention my book at an upcoming talk he’s giving at a VMware user group meeting.  There’s supposed to be 300 attendees.
• Another fellow asked about pre-ordering 10 copies. I had no idea anyone would be so interested. 

This gem happened today on the #powershell IRC channel.

[13:34:56] <vcarter> Can you manage Windows Mojave with PowerShell?
[13:35:07] <vcarter> Asking for a friend
[13:35:18] <neiljmorrow> There is a new version of Powershell
[13:35:27] <neiljmorrow> Called Gonad.
[13:35:38] <vcarter> Is it easier to use than Monad?
[13:35:54] <Jaykul> no, but it’s cross platform
[13:36:05] <Jaykul> runs on Vista, XP, Mohave, and even OSX
[13:36:21] <meson> Gonad = GNU + Monad.

Here’s what the cover of my book will look like.  I’m sure that I’ll get tired of seeing it at some point, but that time is several months away, I’m afraid. 

Here’s an update on my book which is in progress.  The title is “Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell: TFM”, to be published by SAPIEN Press.

I’ve sent my last chapter in for tech review and the replies have started to roll in. This month, I’ll be working on the changes based on those reviews (thanks guys!). The publisher will work on their part in January, and I could have this baby on shelves in February!

Virtu-Al had some nice things to say about it; really appreciate that.