d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
I am a senior auditor, consultant and architect at d-fens for business processes and information systems.
When you try to add a “Global Blueprint” in vCenter Automation Center (vCAC) 5.1 for an Organisation VCD (OvDC) in a vCloud Director (vCD) endpoint you cannot save your settings if you have no Organisation Networks (OrgNetwork) defined. As the selection of a network (and a storage path) is mandatory input and the selection list for the networks is empty you […]
Using PowerCLI for fun and profit in general is a great thing to do – in general… However, in certain cases PowerCLIs implementation is much slower than using the underlying REST calls directly. This is especially true when using Get-CiVm to get information about a vCloud Director (vCD) virtual machine. Consider the following fragment: This is all pretty fast, as […]
Recently I quickly mentioned the universal PowerCLI applet Search-Cloud that can be used when dealing with vCloud Director. Howevery it seems you have to verify its output when using it to query Provider Vdc parameters. The output mixes the “allocation” and “used” counters for CPU, Memory and Storage as you can see in the example below (“used” is larger than […]
Today I want to share a funny experience we had with a clean vCO 5.1 install … Having a freshly installed vCenter 5.1 with an integrated installation of vCO upon first startup the vCO Service did not start and took (15!) minutes to finally reach a state where it was between starting and stopping. The log files included lots of […]
With PowerCLI’s ConnectCI-Server CmdLet it is pretty easy to login to a vCD host. And for most of the time the supplied CmdLets are sufficient enough to solve the problems we deal with it daily. However, sometimes we would like to make specific REST calls to vCD directly (for example when the Searc-Cloud CmdLet is not doing what we want). […]
In certain cases you might want to access a UNC share from a VCO instance. This is especially true when you have a mainly Windows based environment with more than one VCO instance. In addition it comes in handy when you implement the VCO Powershell Bridge I presented earlier. First you have to run the VCO service under a service […]
In vCloud API (via REST, vCO PlugIn, or PowerCLI) you can query CPU, memory and disk usage for VDCs. However, when retrieving the values for current CPU usage you always get ‘0’ – regardless of real current usage. Values for memory and storage seem correct. There is a workaround for this via querying the underlying vCenter resource pool for that […]
With PowerCLI for vCD and vCenter it is particularily easy to determine the underlying vCenter resource pool for any vCloud Organization VDC. You first retrieve the resource pool relation via the Search-Cloud CmdLet via the urn of the VDC and then use the Get-ResourcePool CmdLet to get the actual resource pool (via Typed Queries): done.
Along with the CmdLets in “VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud” you will find a CmdLet that is called “Search-Cloud”. In fact this is one of the most powerful CmdLets in ypur arsenal of vCD CmdLet tools. It is especially useful as it uses the new Query Service of vCD and is thus much faster than the other traditional Get-* CmdLets. The tradeoff is that […]
With the advent of PowerCLI for vCloud Director the reasons for using vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) blur even more. VMware provides us several CmdLets that we can all find in the “VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud” snapin (“Get-Command -Module VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud”). Sure this library is by far not perfect, there is quite some functionality. However, when using the “Get-CiVm” CmdLet you will probably find out quickly […]
The new powershell feature “ordered” hashtable (a new PowerShell feature in v3. See OrderedDictionary Class) becomes an ordinary hashtable when it is imported via Import-CliXml. There is a “active” bug on Microsoft Connect OrderedDictionary becomes Hashtable when exported to and imported from clixml but no action for a couple of months. As a workaround do not use ordered hashtables but […]
Here a few coding considerations that might make you life easer when dealing with PowerShell (but may also hold true for other programming languages): Hide unwanted return information in your code In PowerShell your functions and CmdLets return everything that is output within the function – even if you use an explicit return statement. To avoid unwanted returns from there […]
Microsoft PowerShell allows us to create, read and write performance counters via .NET with ease (check PerformanceCounterCategory in System.Diagnostics). However, there are some gotchas when trying it the first time …
This entry gives a quick overview about the PowerShell verbs to use when abstracting CRUD operations into PowerShell CmdLets.
We launched our new website. Have a look and check out. In the next couple of weeks we will be writing about PowerShell and Automation. Enjoy!
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