A workflow is a sequence of automated steps or activities that execute tasks on or retrieve data from one or more managed nodes (computers or devices). These activities can include individual commands or scripts. Windows PowerShell Workflow enables, IT pros and developers alike, to author sequences of multi-computer management activities — that are either long-running, repeatable, frequent, parallelizable, interruptible, stoppable, or restartable — as workflows. By design, workflows can be resumed from an intentional or accidental suspension or interruption, such as a network outage, a reboot or power loss.

I just had to paste this paragraph. It comes from the recently published “Getting Started with PowerShell Workflow” as announced in this post on the PowerShell team blog. You can grab the PDF from the WMF3 CTP2 download page.

Hot stuff! Go grab the 14 page doc so you can be ready for when v3 ships! There are a ton of examples so that you get started quickly.

Disclaimer: this is pre-release code and will definitely change

So I’m sitting here building a bunch of virtual machines using PowerCLI. I decided to start with a spreadsheet into which I’ve collected many of the important things about a virtual machine:

Since I don’t actually build VMs every day, and I haven’t focused on a build process (like I should, I know!) yet, this spreadsheet was a first draft of a build process and it was made for humans, not machines. What does this mean? Well, obviously, by looking at the Memory column, any of you would guess that the unit of measurement is gigabytes. However, VMware happens to measure memory in megabytes.

Long story short, I wrote a quick one-liner in PowerShell to “spec out” the newly-cloned virtual machines using this spreadsheet. As I said, it’s not a build process yet, but it will be when I’m done. Baby steps. The one-liner looks like this ($t is the variable that holds the data obtained from the spreadsheet, using a simple Import-Csv cmdlet):

   1: $t | % { Set-VM -VM $_.name -NumCpu $_.cpu -MemoryMB $_.Memory }

Once I started that running, I quickly realized that 8MB VMs would do me no good. So, I amended my script to this:

   1: $t | % { Set-VM -VM $_.name -NumCpu $_.cpu -MemoryMB ( $_.Memory * 1024 ) }

That’s when I got a really weird error:

Set-VM : Cannot bind parameter ‘MemoryMB’. Cannot convert value "888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888

88888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888

888888888888888888" to type "System.Int64". Error: "Value was either too large or too small for an Int64."

Yuck! That one threw me for a loop for a moment until I realized the important lesson of the day. When you use a technique like Import-Csv, the resulting object is a bunch of strings! What happens when you multiply a string by a number in PowerShell? Yes, it’s effectively a concatenation. So in my case, the number 8 followed by one-thousand-and-twenty-three of the same. Nice, when that’s what you intended. That was not my intent this time!

So to round this post out with a fix, here’s the right way to get the intended result, which was to turn “8” into “8192”:

   1: $t | % { Set-VM -VM $_.name -NumCpu $_.cpu -MemoryMB ( [int]$_.Memory * 1024 ) }

Note the “[int]” there before the $_. That will convert the resulting property to an integer BEFORE performing the multiplication. That’s the key here, it has to happen before (in the order of precedence), otherwise I end up with a bunch of 8’s. Now, I happen to know the order of operator precedence in PowerShell well enough to know that the above would work without any doubt, but if you aren’t sure about a particular piece of code, you can always surround a portion of a statement with parentheses in order to ensure that you get the order that you need.

Run, don’t walk to vmware.com/go/powercli to grab the latest version of the world’s best PowerShell snapin. That’s right, v5 is out and you can grab it now! And the coolest part is that while nobody will have vSphere 5 in production on day one (ok, there’s a couple of you out there), PowerCLI v5 is a client-based tool with no dependencies, and it’s downwards-compatible! There is literally no reason for you not to upgrade right this instant! I am using exclamations here, people!

I’ve had beta builds installed for some time, but I didn’t want to do blog posts based on pre-release builds for fear that things would change. Now that it’s out, I’ll start pushing out some posts about what’s new and all that, so stay tuned. For now, some quick stats and info:

There are now FOUR VMware snap-ins installed with PowerCLI v5:

PowerCLI U:\> Get-PSSnapin vmware*

Name        : VMware.VimAutomation.Core
PSVersion   : 2.0
Description : This Windows PowerShell snap-in contains Windows PowerShell cmdlets for managing vSphere.

Name        : VMware.VimAutomation.License
PSVersion   : 2.0
Description : This Windows Powershell snap-in contains cmdlets for managing License components.

Name        : VMware.DeployAutomation
PSVersion   : 2.0
Description : Cmdlets for Rule-Based-Deployment

Name        : VMware.ImageBuilder
PSVersion   : 2.0
Description : This Windows PowerShell snap-in contains VMware ESXi Image Builder cmdlets used to generate custom images.

There are 293 cmdlets in total across these snap-ins. Here they are, grouped by Noun and Verb:

PowerCLI U:\> $c = Get-Command -Module vmware*
PowerCLI U:\> $c.Length
293
PowerCLI U:\> $c | group verb

Count Name                      Group
—– —-                      —–
    6 Add                       {Add-DeployRule, Add-EsxSoftwareDepot, Add-E…
    3 Apply                     {Apply-DrsRecommendation, Apply-ESXImageProf…
    1 Compare                   {Compare-EsxImageProfile}
    1 Connect                   {Connect-VIServer}
    4 Copy                      {Copy-DatastoreItem, Copy-DeployRule, Copy-H…
    1 Disconnect                {Disconnect-VIServer}
    1 Dismount                  {Dismount-Tools}
    3 Export                    {Export-EsxImageProfile, Export-VApp, Export…
    1 Format                    {Format-VMHostDiskPartition}
   95 Get                       {Get-AdvancedSetting, Get-AlarmAction, Get-A…
    2 Import                    {Import-VApp, Import-VMHostProfile}
    1 Install                   {Install-VMHostPatch}
    1 Invoke                    {Invoke-VMScript}
    1 Mount                     {Mount-Tools}
    9 Move                      {Move-Cluster, Move-Datacenter, Move-Folder,…
   37 New                       {New-AdvancedSetting, New-AlarmAction, New-A…
   42 Remove                    {Remove-AdvancedSetting, Remove-AlarmAction,…
    2 Repair                    {Repair-DeployImageCache, Repair-DeployRuleS…
    4 Restart                   {Restart-VM, Restart-VMGuest, Restart-VMHost…
   58 Set                       {Set-AdvancedSetting, Set-AlarmDefinition, S…
    1 Shutdown                  {Shutdown-VMGuest}
    4 Start                     {Start-VApp, Start-VM, Start-VMHost, Start-V…
    5 Stop                      {Stop-Task, Stop-VApp, Stop-VM, Stop-VMHost…}
    3 Suspend                   {Suspend-VM, Suspend-VMGuest, Suspend-VMHost}
    1 Switch                    {Switch-ActiveDeployRuleSet}
    3 Test                      {Test-DeployRuleSetCompliance, Test-VMHostPr…
    1 Update                    {Update-Tools}
    2 Wait                      {Wait-Task, Wait-Tools}

PowerCLI U:\> $c | group noun

Count Name                      Group
—– —-                      —–
    6 DeployRule                {Add-DeployRule, Copy-DeployRule, Get-Deploy…
    2 EsxSoftwareDepot          {Add-EsxSoftwareDepot, Remove-EsxSoftwareDepot}
    3 EsxSoftwarePackage        {Add-EsxSoftwarePackage, Get-EsxSoftwarePack…
    3 PassthroughDevice         {Add-PassthroughDevice, Get-PassthroughDevic…
    9 VMHost                    {Add-VMHost, Get-VMHost, Move-VMHost, Remove…
    3 VmHostNtpServer           {Add-VmHostNtpServer, Get-VMHostNtpServer, R…
    2 DrsRecommendation         {Apply-DrsRecommendation, Get-DrsRecommendat…
    6 ESXImageProfile           {Apply-ESXImageProfile, Compare-EsxImageProf…
    7 VMHostProfile             {Apply-VMHostProfile, Export-VMHostProfile, …
    2 VIServer                  {Connect-VIServer, Disconnect-VIServer}
    1 DatastoreItem             {Copy-DatastoreItem}
    5 HardDisk                  {Copy-HardDisk, Get-HardDisk, New-HardDisk, …
    1 VMGuestFile               {Copy-VMGuestFile}
    4 Tools                     {Dismount-Tools, Mount-Tools, Update-Tools, …
    9 VApp                      {Export-VApp, Get-VApp, Import-VApp, Move-VA…
    2 VMHostDiskPartition       {Format-VMHostDiskPartition, Get-VMHostDiskP…
    4 AdvancedSetting           {Get-AdvancedSetting, New-AdvancedSetting, R…
    3 AlarmAction               {Get-AlarmAction, New-AlarmAction, Remove-Al…
    3 AlarmActionTrigger        {Get-AlarmActionTrigger, New-AlarmActionTrig…
    2 AlarmDefinition           {Get-AlarmDefinition, Set-AlarmDefinition}
    2 Annotation                {Get-Annotation, Set-Annotation}
    4 CDDrive                   {Get-CDDrive, New-CDDrive, Remove-CDDrive, S…
    5 Cluster                   {Get-Cluster, Move-Cluster, New-Cluster, Rem…
    4 CustomAttribute           {Get-CustomAttribute, New-CustomAttribute, R…
    5 Datacenter                {Get-Datacenter, Move-Datacenter, New-Datace…
    4 Datastore                 {Get-Datastore, New-Datastore, Remove-Datast…
    1 DatastoreCluster          {Get-DatastoreCluster}
    2 DeployRuleSet             {Get-DeployRuleSet, Set-DeployRuleSet}
    4 DrsRule                   {Get-DrsRule, New-DrsRule, Remove-DrsRule, S…
    1 ErrorReport               {Get-ErrorReport}
    1 EsxCli                    {Get-EsxCli}
    1 EsxSoftwareChannel        {Get-EsxSoftwareChannel}
    1 EsxTop                    {Get-EsxTop}
    4 FloppyDrive               {Get-FloppyDrive, New-FloppyDrive, Remove-Fl…
    5 Folder                    {Get-Folder, Move-Folder, New-Folder, Remove…
    1 HAPrimaryVMHost           {Get-HAPrimaryVMHost}
    3 Inventory                 {Get-Inventory, Move-Inventory, Remove-Inven…
    4 IScsiHbaTarget            {Get-IScsiHbaTarget, New-IScsiHbaTarget, Rem…
    1 LicenseDataManager        {Get-LicenseDataManager}
    1 Log                       {Get-Log}
    1 LogType                   {Get-LogType}
    4 NetworkAdapter            {Get-NetworkAdapter, New-NetworkAdapter, Rem…
    2 NicTeamingPolicy          {Get-NicTeamingPolicy, Set-NicTeamingPolicy}
    4 OSCustomizationNicMapping {Get-OSCustomizationNicMapping, New-OSCustom…
    4 OSCustomizationSpec       {Get-OSCustomizationSpec, New-OSCustomizatio…
    2 PowerCLIConfiguration     {Get-PowerCLIConfiguration, Set-PowerCLIConf…
    1 PowerCLIVersion           {Get-PowerCLIVersion}
    5 ResourcePool              {Get-ResourcePool, Move-ResourcePool, New-Re…
    3 ScsiController            {Get-ScsiController, New-ScsiController, Set…
    2 ScsiLun                   {Get-ScsiLun, Set-ScsiLun}
    2 ScsiLunPath               {Get-ScsiLunPath, Set-ScsiLunPath}
    4 Snapshot                  {Get-Snapshot, New-Snapshot, Remove-Snapshot…
    1 Stat                      {Get-Stat}
    4 StatInterval              {Get-StatInterval, New-StatInterval, Remove-…
    1 StatType                  {Get-StatType}
    3 Task                      {Get-Task, Stop-Task, Wait-Task}
    5 Template                  {Get-Template, Move-Template, New-Template, …
    2 UsbDevice                 {Get-UsbDevice, Remove-UsbDevice}
    1 VIAccount                 {Get-VIAccount}
    3 VICredentialStoreItem     {Get-VICredentialStoreItem, New-VICredential…
    1 VIEvent                   {Get-VIEvent}
    1 View                      {Get-View}
    1 VIObjectByVIView          {Get-VIObjectByVIView}
    4 VIPermission              {Get-VIPermission, New-VIPermission, Remove-…
    1 VIPrivilege               {Get-VIPrivilege}
    3 VIProperty                {Get-VIProperty, New-VIProperty, Remove-VIPr…
    4 VIRole                    {Get-VIRole, New-VIRole, Remove-VIRole, Set-…
    4 VirtualPortGroup          {Get-VirtualPortGroup, New-VirtualPortGroup,…
    4 VirtualSwitch             {Get-VirtualSwitch, New-VirtualSwitch, Remov…
    9 VM                        {Get-VM, Move-VM, New-VM, Remove-VM…}
    4 VMGuest                   {Get-VMGuest, Restart-VMGuest, Shutdown-VMGu…
    2 VMGuestNetworkInterface   {Get-VMGuestNetworkInterface, Set-VMGuestNet…
    3 VMGuestRoute              {Get-VMGuestRoute, New-VMGuestRoute, Remove-…
    4 VMHostAccount             {Get-VMHostAccount, New-VMHostAccount, Remov…
    2 VMHostAdvancedConfigur… {Get-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration, Set-VMHost…
    1 VMHostAttributes          {Get-VMHostAttributes}
    2 VMHostAuthentication      {Get-VMHostAuthentication, Set-VMHostAuthent…
    1 VMHostAvailableTimeZone   {Get-VMHostAvailableTimeZone}
    2 VMHostDiagnosticPartition {Get-VMHostDiagnosticPartition, Set-VMHostDi…
    1 VMHostDisk                {Get-VMHostDisk}
    2 VMHostFirewallDefaultP… {Get-VMHostFirewallDefaultPolicy, Set-VMHost…
    2 VMHostFirewallException   {Get-VMHostFirewallException, Set-VMHostFire…
    2 VMHostFirmware            {Get-VMHostFirmware, Set-VMHostFirmware}
    2 VMHostHba                 {Get-VMHostHba, Set-VMHostHba}
    1 VMHostImageProfile        {Get-VMHostImageProfile}
    1 VMHostMatchingRules       {Get-VMHostMatchingRules}
    2 VMHostModule              {Get-VMHostModule, Set-VMHostModule}
    2 VMHostNetwork             {Get-VMHostNetwork, Set-VMHostNetwork}
    4 VMHostNetworkAdapter      {Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter, New-VMHostNetwork…
    2 VMHostPatch               {Get-VMHostPatch, Install-VMHostPatch}
    1 VMHostProfileRequiredI… {Get-VMHostProfileRequiredInput}
    4 VMHostRoute               {Get-VMHostRoute, New-VMHostRoute, Remove-VM…
    5 VMHostService             {Get-VMHostService, Restart-VMHostService, S…
    3 VMHostSnmp                {Get-VMHostSnmp, Set-VMHostSnmp, Test-VMHost…
    2 VMHostStartPolicy         {Get-VMHostStartPolicy, Set-VMHostStartPolicy}
    2 VMHostStorage             {Get-VMHostStorage, Set-VMHostStorage}
    2 VMHostSysLogServer        {Get-VMHostSysLogServer, Set-VMHostSysLogSer…
    2 VMQuestion                {Get-VMQuestion, Set-VMQuestion}
    2 VMResourceConfiguration   {Get-VMResourceConfiguration, Set-VMResource…
    2 VMStartPolicy             {Get-VMStartPolicy, Set-VMStartPolicy}
    1 VMScript                  {Invoke-VMScript}
    3 CustomField               {New-CustomField, Remove-CustomField, Set-Cu…
    1 DeployImageCache          {Repair-DeployImageCache}
    2 DeployRuleSetCompliance   {Repair-DeployRuleSetCompliance, Test-Deploy…
    1 ActiveDeployRuleSet       {Switch-ActiveDeployRuleSet}
    1 VMHostProfileCompliance   {Test-VMHostProfileCompliance}

Here’s a quick bit of code to change the color of PowerShell ISE’s output pane to match the colors used in the powershell.exe console:

$psise.Options.OutputPaneBackgroundColor = "#012456"
$psise.Options.OutputPaneTextBackgroundColor = "#012456"
$psise.Options.OutputPaneForegroundColor = "#eeedf0"

You can paste these lines into the editor pane and click the run botton to see how it looks. If you like it, add these lines to your ISE profile (notepad $profile) and restart ISE to save the changes.

If you have a server that needs to have the same Windows Server features and roles as another system, here’s an easy way to quickly get that done using PowerShell. I did this logged into each server locally, but you could easily use PowerShell remoting to do the same thing.

Step 1: Run PowerShell with ServerManager module:

Step 2: Export list of currently installed features to XML

Get-WindowsFeature | ? { $_.installed } | Export-Clixml \\server\share\features.xml

Step 3: On second server, run PowerShell and import XML

$f = Import-Clixml \\server\share\features.xml

Step 4: Pipe that bad boy into Add-WindowsFeature!

$f | Add-WindowsFeature

Step 5: Restart, if needed

Restart-Computer

That’s it!

I was only able to attend one full day of the show, but it was a pretty productive day for me. I gave a “birds of a feather” session to a packed room on Tuesday that was really well received. That was followed up with meeting with folks from Train Signal, Sapien, Cisco, amd several others. Then, I hung out at the Powershell and Scripting Guys booths for a while. After lunch with Jason Shirk from the Powershell team, I met with Kirk Munro to get the skinny on PowerGUI Pro 3.0. I did record it for the podcast, so look for that to be published to the site very soon.

Speaking of the podcast, I was able to meet some very interesting people who have committed to coming on the show to talk about what they are doing with Powershell! As always, follow our website for show news about upcoming guests.

While taking a break in the Connect Zone, I met up with my MVP lead. Garth put up a short video where we talked about TechEd. I hope you find it interesting, or at least good fodder for making fun of me.

Man, I need to blog more. Spoiled by Twitter!

I’m not speaking this year, but I was really impressed when I spoke at TM Orlando a couple of years ago. You should check it out, and here’s a discount!

You’re not too late for TechMentor Orlando (http://www.techmentorevents.com/orlando2011), March 14 – 18, 2011 at Disney’s Yacht Club.
TechMentor is offering you the best discount so far – $400 discount off the 5 Day Best Value Conference Pass (discount applies to the Standard rate and new registrations only)! Register at http://bit.ly/TMReg with the code UGTM10 for the discount.
If you’ve never attended it, TechMentor is 5 intensive and informative days of immediately-applicable training on today’s critical IT topics – everything from Active Directory to Virtualization – with a specific track and several sessions on PowerShell. Go to http://bit.ly/TMPwrShl if you want to know more about sessions and speakers.

That’s right, I’m going to go there—with PowerCLI! The topic of how to kill a stuck or hung VM has been done to death using SSH and a few arcane shell commands, or a long-running support script. But did you know you can do the same thing using PowerCLI? I’ll be teaching you how in my latest PowerCLI training video from TrainSignal. If I get the time, I’ll put put up a detailed blog post detailing how its done. For now though—just a tease.

Well, technically, it’s not uptime, it’s “last boot time”, but you know what I mean. I think this is much more useful than the number of seconds since the last boot anyway…

$LastBootProp = @{
  Name = 'LastBootTime'
    Expression = {
      ( Get-Date ) - ( New-TimeSpan -Seconds $_.Summary.QuickStats.UptimeSeconds )
	}
}
Get-VM | Get-View | select Name, $LastBootProp

In case you are curious, a “quick tip” means that I don’t have time to write a longer post. Hey, it’s better than not sharing!

First of all—I feel like such a n00b to be posting this. It’s fair to say that I know a bit about PowerShell but, man, the world is so big and I certainly do not know it all. As I always say, if I didn’t learn something today, then I must be dead.

Ok, on to the learning. As you may have heard, I changed jobs recently. I now work at a 500-person insurance company with a 70-person IT staff. By far the smallest company I’ve ever worked for (following MCI, HP, IBM, The Home Depot). In this new job, I have to wear many hats, which should be no surprise to those of you who work in SMB! I think it’s great, actually, because I’m exercising my brain in ways it hasn’t been in ages. For example, I don’t know crap about Active Directory, at least relative to other aspects of Windows considering the amount of time that I’ve called myself a Windows admin. So when it came time for me to do some routine AD cleanup, I certainly had to learn a few things—which is a good thing to me.

The task ahead of me was that there were tons of stale AD computer accounts in our domain. (See, I call it a domain, that’s how old my AD knowledge is.) Normally, this doesn’t hurt anything, but in our case, we have an anti-virus app which allocates licenses automatically based on the computer objects! So we were wasting licenses on computers which didn’t exist, and that needed cleaning up.

Of course, my first thought was to do it with PowerShell. I already had the venerable Quest AD snap-in loaded, so I just ran a quick one-liner to make my list of potential accounts. This was the easy part.

$c = Get-QADComputer -InactiveFor 90

After doing some sanity ping checks to make sure this list was good, I went to delete the first one:

PS> $c[0] | Remove-QADObject

Warning!
Are you sure you want to delete this object: CN=foobar,DC=domain,DC=com?
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"):
Remove-QADObject : The directory service can perform the requested operation only on a leaf object.
At line:1 char:25
+ $c[0] | Remove-QADObject <<<<
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Remove-QADObject], DirectoryServicesCOMException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryServicesCOMException,Quest.ActiveRoles.ArsPowerShell
   eObjectCmdlet

Oops, that didn’t work! Well, I did some research and found an old newsgroup post that says that computer objects are really containers and that in order to delete them, you have to use the DeleteTree switch. So, I tried that:

PS> $c[0] | Remove-QADObject –DeleteTree

Warning!
Are you sure you want to delete this object and its children: CN=foobar,DC=domain,DC=com?
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"):
Remove-QADObject : Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
At line:1 char:25
+ $c[0] | Remove-QADObject <<<<  -DeleteTree
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Remove-QADObject], UnauthorizedAccessException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.UnauthorizedAccessException,Quest.ActiveRoles.ArsPowerShellSnapIn.Cmdlets.RemoveO
   bjectCmdlet

Access denied! So, I tried an elevated shell. No help. Back to Google. I searched for “access denied remove-qadobject deletetree” and the third hit looked interesting. It was a section on working with computer objects in the book Active Directory Cookbook (awesome that google books does that). From reading this, I realized that somewhere in the permissions hierarchy, these computer objects had accidental deletion prevention enabled! Luckily, they had some PowerShell code that I quickly adapted to my situation:

PS> $c | Add-QADPermission -Account 'EVERYONE' -Rights 'Delete,DeleteTree' -ApplyTo 'ThisObjectOnly'

Ctrl   Account                                  Rights                              Source           AppliesTo
----   -------                                  ------                              ------           ---------
       Everyone                                 Special                             Not inherited    This object only
       Everyone                                 Special                             Not inherited    This object only
       Everyone                                 Special                             Not inherited    This object only

Plus 507 more lines just like that. And then, I tried again and…

PS> $c = Get-QADComputer -InactiveFor 90
PS> $c
PS> 

Success! I hope that this post that illustrates my learning process helps someone else who comes across the same situation.

I had a former co-worker ask me recently how a company in Atlanta could obtain training in PowerShell. I wanted to share the info here as well.

• Don Jones of Concentrated Tech offers onsite training as well as other services Don was the lead author for the official Microsoft (MOC) courseware for PowerShell, and he’s one of the best IT speakers around. Co-author of PowerShell: TFM
• Jeff Hicks. The other half of PowerShell: TFM, and author of Managing Active Directory with PowerShell: TFM. (linkedin profile) 
• Global Knowledge has a PowerShell course
• So does New Horizons
• I myself produced a set of videos for Train Signal. They are geared to VMware admins, so if you fit that bucket, you will like.

• VMware vSphere Pro Vol. 1
• VMware vSphere Pro Vol. 2

Hope this helps!

I’ll talk about this one in detail on an upcoming podcast. In the meantime, I’m afraid this will be a short post without my usual verbosity. However—verbosity just happens to be the subject of this post!

If you put a line like the following in your script, and either set $verbosepreference to ‘conitnue’, or use a –Verbose flag on a function, you’ll get a nice echoing of your parameters back to the console. This can be helpful when debugging a script.

$psBoundParameters.GetEnumerator() | ForEach-Object { Write-Verbose "Parameter: $_" }

VERBOSE: Parameter: [ComputerName, cpliis3x]

I just read a blog post from Thomas Lee that talked about Paper.Li. I really like this site and thought I’d share as well. In particular, there is a feature to browse tweets by hashtag. I can see this as being really useful for me as I prepare the show notes for the PowerScripting Podcast (the #powershell tag, of course). Here’s a screenshot:

Go check out paper.li!

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   :

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.

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.

PowerShell.com just posted a tip today on how to create a range of letters. The tip looks like this:

65..90 | Foreach-Object { "$([char]$_):" }

That works fine, but I have another way to share with you in case you don’t want to look up the ASCII values every time. This is very similar to a technique used in my Random Letters post of not too long ago:

[char[]]([char]'a'..[char]'z')

[string]( [char[]]([char]'a'..[char]'z') )

"$([char[]]([char]'a'..[char]'z'))"

First, let me give credit up front that this tip was inspired by one or two recent Power Tips from PowerShell.com.

With that out of the way, I wanted to show you real quick that if you want the sort of information that you get from ipconfig.exe, then the command is even simpler:

PS > gwmi win32_networkadapterconfiguration | ? { $_.IPAddress }

DHCPEnabled      : True

IPAddress        : {151.140.143.41}

DefaultIPGateway : {151.140.142.1}

DNSDomain        : halr9000.com

ServiceName      : b57w2k

Description      : Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet - Packet Scheduler Miniport

Index            : 8

DHCPEnabled      : True

IPAddress        : {151.140.143.41}

DefaultIPGateway : {151.140.142.1}

DNSDomain        : whatever.local

 ServiceName      : AR5416

Description      : Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet - Packet Scheduler Miniport

Index            : 10

You can rely on the default output of the Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration WMI class to display some of the more important bits here—just like ipconfig. But what if you want more—in other words, “ipconfig /all”? That data is already in there, but it’s not displayed to the screen by default. To get at it, you can pipe to Format-List and stick an asterisk at the end to tell it to display everything, like so:

PS > gwmi win32_networkadapterconfiguration | ? { $_.IPAddress } | fl *

DHCPLeaseExpires             : 20100427081921.000000-240

Index                        : 8

Description                  : Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet - Packet Scheduler Miniport

DHCPEnabled                  : True

DHCPLeaseObtained            : 20100421081921.000000-240

DHCPServer                   : 165.130.252.36

...

I used a couple of aliases in the above examples because it saves typing. To be clear for those who don’t know them, here are the definitions:

gwmi = Get-WmiObject

? = Where-Object

fl = Format-List

If you are in the Southeast US, you may be interested in the upcoming Codestock event coming up in June in Knoxville, TN. It seems to be heavily slanted towards developers, but they are doing IT Pro and Entrepeneur tracks this year as well. I have submitted one session for my Managing VMware with PowerShell thing. If you have a minute, please go over to the site to register and vote my session up.

I’ve never been to Codestock before, but it looks like fun. In fact, it looks like a lot more fun than your typical canned vendor convention. I don’t plan on doing many speaker engagements this year aside from the occasional SMUG or APUG meeting here in Atlanta, but I thought going to Knoxville might be a neat excuse to get out an d see a new city. The drive to Knoxville from Atlanta is pretty nice if you go through Chattahoochee and Nantahala national forests, so we are looking forward to that.

(credit tfdavis on flickr)