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.

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.

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.

get-cluster ProdCluster | get-vmhost | get-virtualswitch -name vSwitch1 | new-virtualportgroup -name Prod-Vlan0123 -vlanid 123

# 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).

• VMware KB: Recreating a missing virtual machine disk (VMDK) descriptor file.
• VMware KB: Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) descriptor file for delta disks.

Here’s a great one-liner to copy all the portgroups from one host’s vswitch to a new host’s vswitch (example below copies oldhost’s portgroups on vSwitch1 to newhost’s portgroups on vSwitch2, keeping VLAN IDs intact):

$oldhost = get-vmhost -name oldhost.local.dom
$newhost = get-vmhost -name newhost.local.dom

$oldhost | get-virtualswitch -name vSwitch1 | get-virtualportgroup | foreach { $newportgroup = $newhost | get-virtualswitch -name vSwitch2 | new-virtualportgroup -name $_.Name -VLanID $_.VLanID }

(via Reset HP ILO Via the Command Line)

</>hpiLO-> cd /map1

status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED
Tue Nov  6 03:25:05 2012

/map1

</map1>hpiLO-> reset

status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED
Tue Nov  6 03:25:10 2012

Resetting iLO.

CLI session stopped

VMware: Srm::Installation::Database::CheckDsn: INFORMATION: Validating DB type: SQL Server
VMware: Srm::Installation::Database::CheckDsn: INFORMATION: Successfully connected to database.
VMware: Srm::Installation::Database::CheckDbPopulatedAndNeedsUpgrade: INFORMATION: Database already contains product tables.
VMware: Srm::Installation::Database::CheckDbPopulatedAndNeedsUpgrade: INFORMATION: Database version: ’4.0.0′
VMware: Srm::Installation::Utility::GetMsgFromErrorTable: INFORMATION: Error message is The provided database version is not supported. Please enter a supported database.
VMware: Srm::Installation::Database::CheckDbPopulatedAndNeedsUpgrade: ERROR: Unsupported database instance.

Caught red-handed, I was trying to “upgrade” an SRM 4.0.0 installation to 5.0, which is not supported. I didn’t need the current config as it was easy to reconfigure, so I dropped the tables and was able to continue on and finish the installation.