Enterprise Admins.org

In an earlier post I mentioned a script written by a co-worker to determine all of the non-thinprovisioned virtual machines.  This script is a follow-up to that, which allows actually uses storage vMotion to resolve the problems.  It is important to note that this script does not provide ANY error checking — if you try to move virtual machines to a datastore that does not have enough capacity you’ll be in trouble.  However, I have used this script to re-arrange many virtual machines and it was successful (I always verified I had enough target capacity before starting the script).

$dsView = Get-Datastore -Name "target-datastore" | Get-View -Property Name

Get-VM "vm-num1","vm-num2" | % {
$vmView = $_ | Get-View -Property Name
$spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineRelocateSpec
$spec.datastore =  $dsView.MoRef
$spec.transform = "sparse"
$vmView.RelocateVM($spec, $null)
}

Another interesting PowerCLI script from today.  My proof of concept environment uses thin provisioned disks — this lets us have a lot more test machines than we really have disk space.   The other day we ran out of space — a new admin had been creating test machines for a project using oversized disks and thick-provisioning.  A coworker actually came up with this script to help find those disks so we could turn thin provisioning back on:

get-vm | get-view | %{
 
$name = $_.name
 
$_.Config.Hardware.Device | where {$_.GetType().Name -eq "VirtualDisk"} |  %{
 
if(!$_.Backing.ThinProvisioned){
 
"$name has a thick provisioned disk"
 
}
 
}
 
}

I’ve been working on cleaning up my vSphere environment and found a very handy one-liner today.  The full article can be found here:

http://frankdenneman.nl/2009/12/impact-of-mismatch-guest-os-type/

I took the suggestions in the comments and came up with the following:

Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | Where { $_.Guest.GuestFullname -ne $_.Summary.Config.GuestFullName } | Sort Name |Select-Object Name, @{N=”InstalledOS”;E={$_.Guest.GuestFullName}}, @{N=”SelectedOS”;E={$_.Summary.Config.GuestFullName}} | Out-GridView