Category Archives: PowerCLI

Find and unmount CD drives with PowerCLI

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Sometimes someone forgets to unmount the CD drive of a VM. This will interfere with operation tasks like setting a host in maintenance mode or using Update Manager.

I recently had this issue, and the “update manager compliance check” told me that several VM’s where connected to a CD drive, which may interrupt the update process. I quickly found my favorite tool for vcenter management, the powerCLI. The quick and dirty oneliner ended up like this:

get-cluster %clustername% | get-vm | where {(($_ | Get-CDDrive).isopath) -gt ""} | %{$_ | Get-CDDrive | Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$false}

Replace %clustername% with your cluster name, and all your troubles will be over 🙂

I have always loved oneliners. I have spent the part time of my time working in bash terminals, where the history has always been persistent. Luckily Microsoft has also seen the light, and history is now persistent (and searchable) in powershell. Search for a phrase using ctrl+r, search further back by pressing ctrl+r again. I’m sure you will learn to love it, if you don’t already do.

Add new virtualportgroup to vSwitch on multiple VMHosts with Powercli

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If you dont have dvSwitches (Distributed vSwitches) in your vSphere cluster, or dont even have a cluster, you may have to add new portgroups manually, depending on the number of VMHosts this can be a pretty cumbersome task.

Luckily, we can use powercli to automate the task. In the following example i will use the -location parameter to define my tagets in the variable $hosts

Lets go ahead and define the VMhosts we want to target:

$hosts=get-vmhost -location “location”

Then, we create the new portgroup for every VMhost in the location by using a foreach loop:

foreach ($vmhost in $hosts) {Get-VMHost $vmhost | Get-VirtualSwitch -name “vSwitch0” | New-VirtualPortGroup -VLanId “10” -Name “Name”}

This will create a new VirtualPortGroup with VLAN ID 10 named “Name” on vSwitch0 on all the VMHosts in the specified location.

Remove the port again by doing this:

foreach ($vmhost in $hosts) {Get-VMHost $vmhost | Get-VirtualSwitch -name “vSwitch0” | Get-VirtualPortGroup -Name “Name” | Remove-VirtualPortGroup -Confirm:$false}

Remember that -Confirm:$false will remove the port without confirmation! Make sure you have the right targets in the $hosts variable!!!

Saving and restoring ESXi configuration, and fixing VMKCore coredump partition dump issues

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Hi all.
Today i had to reinstall some ESXi 5.5 hosts as we were upgrading to SSD disks, in order to have more performance on the Citrix environment we are hosting.

Before i powered off the server, i saved the configuration to use for easy reconfiguration with the following command from powercli:

Get-VMHostFirmware -VMHost xxx-hostname-xxx -BackupConfiguration -DestinationPath C:\HostBackups\

Now i got a xxx.tgz file containing the full configuration of the original ESXi host, ready for importing back when the reinstall is done.

When the server was installed on the new disks, i connected directly to the reinstalled server by its IP address,  put the server in maintenance mode and imported the configuration backup with these commands from powercli:

Set-VMHost -State Maintenance

 

Set-VMHostFirmware -VMHost xxx-hostname-xxx -Restore -SourcePath c:\HostBackups\xxx.tgz -HostUser user -HostPassword password

Because of the new disks i got an error regarding my vmkcore vmkdumpfile that was missing. I was able to list the partition table, which showed that i had two different dump partitions, but none of them were configured for use.
To get it fixed i had to unconfigure the existing coredump partition with this command from the ESXi shell:

esxcli system coredump partition set -u

And then reconfigure the partition with this command, also from the ESXi shell:

esxcli system coredump partition set –enable true –smart

This command will let the system choose which partition to use for the coredumps. The system will now use the choosen partition, no reboot needed.