Enterprise Admins.org

I typically do not view my vCheck report as an email message…I have a link to the report on the home screen of my vSphere Client (if you’d like to see how to do that, please check out this post: http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/vcheck-as-a-vsphere-client-solution-and-application/). However, I’ve noticed many comments requesting better email support. From my research, it appears that the problem is likely with Outlook 2007 — since it does not properly support all cascading style sheets (CSS) properties. After a little bit of testing, I believe I have found a rather simple way to work around this. The change adjusts the e-mail output and leaves the standard HTML output file alone.

This is a very minor change and I plan to include it in a future release. If you get a chance please test it out and report back if it works for you too.

Change line #2158 from

send-SMTPmail $EmailTo $EmailFrom "$VISRV vCheck Report" $SMTPSRV $MyReport

to

send-SMTPmail $EmailTo $EmailFrom "$VISRV vCheck Report" $SMTPSRV $MyReport.Replace("class=`"dsp ","class=`"")

This simply removes one of the CSS tags from the email message body, making the report easier to read from email clients (at this point the format has only been tested with Outlook 2007).

If you need a copy of the vCheck 5.31 version, you can get it here: http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/vCheck5.31.ps1_.txt

As many of you know, I have created a vCheck feature request list (http://bit.ly/dGrNjh) using comments from the Virtu-Al.net site. I’ve been working through them as time permits.

In a post earlier in the week, I provided a solution to make ‘vCheck as a vSphere Client “Solutions and Application”‘. This post attempted to resolve feature request items #16 and #17. If you are interested, that post is available here: http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/?p=258. It is not really a change to vCheck, but some steps that need to happen to make vCheck appear in vCenter.

Today, I’m am posting more updates to vCheck. This updated version includes feature requests #2, #11 and #51.

# Version 5.31- bwuch: Bug fix for LockdownMode
# Version 5.30- bwuch: Add check for VMtools installer connected
# Version 5.29- bwuch: Add check for VM capacity forecasting
# Version 5.28- bwuch: Change to Get-HTMLTable function for possible performance improvements

I’m sure update 5.28 was suggested in the Virtu-Al.net comments, but for some reason I couldn’t find it on the feature request list.

Update 5.29 isn’t perfect and I wanted to let everyone know. There are comments in the code, but I wanted to add them to this post for reference. Instead of looping through all of the virtual machines and adding up the amount of space used, I simply subtract the data store free space from the capacity and assume that is how much is being used. We also make the assumption that no more than 85% of a datastores capacity will be used (to reserve room for thin-provisioned growth, snapshots, changed block tracking and log files). These assumptions make the code run pretty fast, but I’ve seen some oddities in my test environment. (Like -41 virtual machines remaining in a data center I’m sure has enough free space for 1 or 2 more VMs 🙂 ) Here is what I’ve added to the comments of the script for reference:

# The disk forecast will be per datacenter instead of per cluster since
# Get-Datastore -Entity only supports VirtualMachine, VMHost, and Datacenter objects.
# To improve performance in code, we are going to make the following assumptions
#   Assumption 1.) Disk capacity - Free Space = space used by VMs
#   Assumption 2.) used space / count of VMs = Avg Space used per VM
#   Assumption 3.) we will reserve 15% of capacity for overhead

If anyone else has a better solution (fast and accurate) please let me know.

Here is version 5.31 for those interested: Download vCheck5.31.ps1.txt