VirtIRL is about all forms of virtualization – server, storage, desktop – and not just x86! Check out this post by former coworker ericVB: Creating an HP Integrity Virtual Machine on HP-UX 11.31 | Eric VB.com.
QLogic Mt. Rainier Technology Preview
QLogic Mt. Rainier Technology Preview
Everybody’s favorite VMware Storage blogger Cormac Hogan discusses the new QLogic Mt. Rainier technology which basically involves a dual-port 8GB HBA with onboard 200 or 400GB of SLC cache.
Read-cache only at the moment (writes go direct to the LUN, not cached on the card). Very cool.
Answering VM questions with PowerCLI
Managing Virtual Machine questions with PowerCLI | VMware PowerCLI Blog – VMware Blogs.
Seems like every day there are a number of View VMs that have the question asking if the VM was moved or copied. VMware View can’t do any operations with them until the question is answered, and it won’t answer the question itself so here’s a quick one-liner to just answer them all at once:
Get-VMQuestion | Set-VMQuestion -Option "I copied it" -confirm:$false
This could be scripted to run regularly, but for now I only run it when I see a few pending questions.
Count of powered-on VMs in a cluster
Great couple of one-liners and some thoughts on speeding them up: How many Powered On VMs are running on my host + Speed up your PowerCLI cmdlets! | Boerlowie’s Blog.
I was looking for this to get a quick way to count the number of VMs powered up in a cluster:
get-cluster Cluster01 | get-vm | where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"} | measure-object
The article lists some ways to speed up the above by using get-view, but if you are looking for something quick and dirty, this will do the trick.
Quickly add a portgroup to all hosts in a cluster
Sometimes a new VLAN comes along that needs to be added to all hosts. This snippet is probably really obvious to anyone who’s done anything with VMware PowerCLI, but here it is anyway: Quickly add the same new portgroup/vlan to all hosts in a cluster:
get-cluster ProdCluster | get-vmhost | get-virtualswitch -name vSwitch1 | new-virtualportgroup -name Prod-Vlan0123 -vlanid 123
Datastore migration, one VM at a time
Found some good PowerCLI Examples | ForwardOrReverse including the one I was looking for, to move VMs from one datastore to another, one at a time:
# Storage VMotion ALL VMs from one LUN to another (One at a time)
Get-Datastore "Old_Datastore_01" | Get-VM | ForEach-Object {Move-VM -VM $_ -Datastore "New_Datastore_01"}
The nice thing about this is you can open multiple powershell windows and do a few migrations concurrently, if your storage infrastructure is capable of it, without kicking off movement of all VMs at the same time from the source datastore (get-vm | move-vm would cause this to happen).
Recreating a missing virtual machine disk (VMDK) descriptor file
For those days where you feel like pulling out your hair, VMware offers these lovely articles:
- VMware KB: Recreating a missing virtual machine disk (VMDK) descriptor file.
- VMware KB: Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) descriptor file for delta disks.