I had a great time chatting with my vNeighbor Rich Brambley, Marc Farley, and Scott Herold on the Virtumania podcast the other day. Please go check out VIRTUMANIA 20 and be sure to download their other episodes.

From the blog post:

“This week’s discussion focuses on using Powershell in virtual environments instead of a GUI, compares learning scripting to learning the verbs and nouns of a new language such as Latin, and highlights several Powershell sites and tools that every administrator should check out.”

Need to determine what the uplink policy is for your DVSwitches? Here is a quick PowerCLI snippet to do that. I’d go into more detail but I don’t have time this moment. Consider this longer than a tweet, but shorter than my normal blog post.

Here is the corresponding screen in the vSphere Client (pardon the font issues, I’m running blind-person-size-font) with the relevant portion highlighted:

And the code:

PS> $pgName = 'Name of your DV port group'
PS> $pg = Get-View -ViewType DistributedVirtualPortgroup -Filter @{ Name = $pgName }
PS> $pg.Config.DefaultPortConfig.UplinkTeamingPolicy.UplinkPortOrder

ActiveUplinkPort  : {dvUplink1, dvUplink2}
StandbyUplinkPort :
Inherited         : True
DynamicType       :
DynamicProperty   :

With the release of vSphere 4.1, we also get PowerCLI 4.1! Here’s a taste of the new stuff from the changelog.

There have been many book releases in the months since PowerShell V2 has been released, and there are several still in the works. It’s also neat to see all of the localized book projects—that really shows how important PowerShell is the entire world over. Here is a list of the books that I’ve heard about lately, in alpha order by title:

If you know of any that I have missed, please let me know in the comments.

I thought I’d share another slide with you tonight. This is also from my upcoming Train Signal vSphere Pro video. Before tackling a set of PowerCLI cmdlets, I like to give you a good base understanding of the concepts.

I just came across this intro to Chapter 7 of my book recently while looking up some information on PowerCLI. I had not re-read it in a while and I really forgot how *ahem* funny it was. Well, anyway, for your entertainment, a quote from my book:

Chapter 7

Troubleshooting and Problem Resolution

This chapter focuses on the fine art of troubleshooting. I won’t actually be teaching you this vaunted skill, oh no. That would require that you study in an IT Shop as Apprentice for four years (much of that on the helpdesk). Only then can you go out into the world to make your own way as a hard-working JourneyAdmin. Many stop there, never caring to put in the countless hours of after-hours work in lonely datacenters before daring to submit detailed Visio diagrams of the infrastructure they built over the years to the IT Masters for evaluation and much ridicule. It is a long road, I won’t lie to you. Yet, the rewards of attaining a MasterAdmin certification (you get a little trophy for your desk), are great and wondrous. Once you have your little trophy, you get to choose a symbol of your dedication to the IT practice—a totem if you will. Everyone seems to pick a Smartphone, lately, although some still choose the more traditional Commodore 64 Model 1541 5¼ inch floppy disk drive.

This chapter is actually much less glamorous than all that, I’m afraid. I will, however, provide you with a set of tools to assist you in the complicated and often perilous journey down that winding path. You know, stuff like how to read a log file, and how to monitor CPU usage.

I really should make a book to go along with that.

As evidenced by the slide I’m working on at the moment for the upcoming TrainSignal vSphere Pro Series lesson titled “Performance with PowerCLI”.

I really wanted to use stars for the difficulty level and make them vibrate like they do in the game, but I was spending too much time on this slide as it was.

Here is a roundup of several shows that I’ve been listening to, in alphabetical order:

Just thought I’d share this slide (draft) to see if the ‘net peoples have any interesting thoughts to share on the topic. Here’s my opening salvo:

Out of all of the above statements, I think the last is the most overlooked. Discuss.