Release Announcement – vSphere PowerCLI 6.3 Release 1

PowerCLI just got supercharged.  New features in this release include vSAN, Horizon View, VVOLs and more.  Check out below for more details.

For more information on changes made in VMware PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1, including improvements, security enhancements, and deprecated features, see the VMware PowerCLI Change Log. For more information on specific product features, see the VMware PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1 User’s Guide. For more information on specific cmdlets, see the VMware PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1 Cmdlet Reference.

You can find the PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1 download HERE. Get it today!

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vCloud Automation Cetner 5.2 – vCAC 5.2 and Citrix XenDesktop Demystified

I have seen a rise in questions regarding vCAC 5.x and integration with XenDesktop. This article is not a step by step on how to configure integration with XenDesktop, but information on capabilities and use cases for integration.

Supported XenDesktop Versions:

  • XenDesktop 4.0 (Only VMware Hypervisor and vCAC VDI agent must be installed on a 32-bit host.)
  • XenDesktop 5.0 (SP1 (Supported on VMware and XenServer)
  • XenDesktop 5.5 (Supported on VMware and XenServer)

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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC – Workflow and Script to Change CPU’s to Cores

During a POC something was brought to my attention that I haven’t heard anyone ask for before, but it seems like a very useful and valid need. The ask was to be able to set CPU Cores during provisioning rather than CPU’s. Operating Systems and other apps license by sockets, not cores so instead of having 8 CPU Sockets with 1 core, why not have 1 CPU Socket with 8 Cores. So I decided to build a solution that would solve this and change the CPU Sockets to Cores.

Now I prefer to do as much as I can in the design center and with the WorkFlow stubs because then they will work for everyone without the need for the CDK so taking that into consideration here is what I have built.

Background Info:

I am executing my script at the MachineProvisioned state of the virtual machines lifecycle. This can mean different things based on the provisioning type that is selected. If we are talking about cloning then it means that the clone has finished, vCAC hardware customization has taken place, Customization Specification has executed, any operation performed by the guest agent are complete and the VM for all intents is complete.Using the WFStubMachineProvisioned workflow however I can perform additional operations before the machine is handed off to the owner. In this case I’m using the workflow stub to execute a powershell script named SocketsToCores.
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.2 is offically GA and available for download!

vCAC 5.2 was officially released yesterday and made available publicly on the VMware website located here. Although it’s available on customers that have licenses for the product can access the download. Currently there is no public trial available.

New features in vCAC 5.2

  • Enhanced vCloud Director Integration – Support for Pay as you go, Reservations of partial oVDC’s, Individual management of VM’s within a vApp, and management of existing vApps.
  • Support for KVM – KVM support is adopted through the use of RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Manager 3.1 and supports provisioning of machines and management capabilities for the provisioned managed VM’s.
  • vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) – Supports provisioning of machines into existing VXLAN’s, Security Groups, as well as load balancers.
  • Customizable Reclamation Workflows – This is an enhancement to vCAC’s reclamation workflows which were previously very static and not customizable. In this release you now have the ability to customize a new lease length and the wait time before enforcing the new lease period.
  • SRM Compatibility – Notice the word compatibility. vCAC will not discover both the primary and recovery VM and allow management of only the primary. So no real functional support for SRM, but it is at least now compatible and able to function in SRM environment.
  • Windows 2012 Managed Guest OS – vCAC 5.2 now offers support for Windows 2012 as a guest operating system.
  • Lot’s of bug fixes – If you read the release notes located here, you will see there are about 5 pages of resolved issues.

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DailyHypervisor Forums are online.

We have just launched our DailyHypervisor Forum located at http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/forum. Stop by, contribute and be a part of our community. The DH Forum is intended to be for all things cloud. Currently we have forums created for vCAC, vCD, vCO, Cloud General, and Openstack. More forum categories will be coming based on demand. If you have a category you would like to see shoot us a note and let us know.

Our goal is to create a common place where anyone can come to learn, get help, share ideas, or just about anything that will help foster knowledge regarding cloud computing. Considering this very blog is the announcement of our forum you could image there isn’t a whole lot happening yet so what are you waiting for, be the first. Go ask a question, post an issue, share a thought and let’s get things rolling.

vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Custom Property of the Day #1 – Operating System

Property of the day is a new series I’m starting where I will cover a different custom property each day. This is the first property of the day check back each day for a new property.

POTD #1 Operating System
 
vCAC version: 5.1
 
Property Name
 
VMware.VirtualCenter.OperatingSystem
 
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Example CMDB Integration

I keep getting asked for an example of integrating into a CMDB. The challenge with this is which CMDB, Asset, or Ticketing system do you create an example around. They are all very different and most organizations have heavily customized them. My solution was to create a sample system to demonstrate vCAC’s capabilities and leave the specifics of any particular CMDB out of the equation.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to integrate vCAC 5.1 into an external system of your choosing. In my example I’m using a simple SQL database with a very simple web front end. My workflow is going to call a PowerShell Script that uses SQL statements to update the database with the value I want populated. Now you can take this and have execute code to talk to a specific API or database, btu the point is how to get the data you want from vCAC when you want it and make it usable to push to another system.

I have provided my sample database, web front-end, Workflows,and Scripts download here.
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vCloud Automation Center – vCAC 5.1 – Workflow Designer Walk-Through – Add Computer Account to Active Directory OU

OK so in this article we are going to create our first workflow that executes a powershell script that adds a computer account to active directory in whatever OU you would like it to be placed in. Our Powershell script will get loaded in to the Model Manager Repository and we will modify the “MachineRequested” workflow stub to execute our script. Then we will use the workflow stub property to determine for which VM’s we want want the workflow stub to execute.

Dependencies

Active Directory Module for Powershell

  1. Open the Powershell Console
  2. Run “Import-Module ServerManager”
  3. Run “Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-Powershell”

Installation

Create Powershell Script
First thing we need to do is create our powershell script. The script that we will need has to do a few things. It needs to pull values from vCAC that will be used to add the machine to AD. The values we are going to pull are Hostname, DNSDomain, & Active Directory OU. We will use the Hostname and DNSDomain to create the FQDN for the server. The code for the script is below or you can just download it from here.

## Assign Custom Properties from vCAC to variables to be utilized as part of our script.
## Script created by Sid Smith http://www.dailyhypervisor.com
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Keep it simple stupid – registering unregistered vm’s

Last week my boss came to me and asked if I could write a script for a customer to register VM’s after being replicated from once VI environment to another.  I agreed to take on the project and go for it.

Like everything I do these days I decided to use powershell to write the script.  I have taken a liking to it and the fact that I can run the scripts on both ESX and ESXi hosts saves me from having to re-create scripts all the time.  So I plugged away to 3am wrote the script, tested it inside out and sideways in my lab.  I was confident in the scripts ability to register all vm’s form all datastores I went ahead and sent it off to the customer.

A few days later I was on a conference call with the customer.  They were having problems with the script.  It wasn’t registering all the vm’s.  After a few hours of troubleshooting I realized that I needed to go back and try to recreate the problem’s in my lab to fix the script, but the customer didn’t have that kind of time.

A short while after getting off the meeting with the customer I received an email from them stating not to worry they had gotten a shell script that worked.  Then I started to think…….  I went in to my lab and created a shell script that would do the job.  The shell script was 5 lines long as oppose to powershell script that is about 40 lines.

The shell script if anyone needs it looks like this:

for v in ‘find /vmfs/volumes/ -name “*.vmx” `
do
echo “Registering $v” >> /log/registeredvms.log
vmware-cmd -s register $v
done

So the short of the story is sometimes it is best to keep it simple stupid.  Utilizing powershell for this problem was just too much overkill and in the end there were issues that were overlooked that I still can’t reproduce in my lab.  A simple shell script is all that was required and what I should have originally decided on.

So in the end this is a lesson learned and hopefully it will prevent someone else from making the same mistake.

VI Toolkit powershell simple script #4 – VM Information

This is a good powershell script for tacking virtual machine inforamtion for change management. It will output the vm’s name, the host it is on, the powerstate, Memory, Number of CPU’s, IP address, and FQDN to a csv file.


$IPprop = @{ Name = "IP Address"; Expression = { $_.Guest.IpAddress } }
$HostNameProp = @{ Name = "Hostname"; Expression = { $_.Guest.Hostname } }
Get-VM | select name, host, powerstate, MemoryMB, numCPU, $IPprop, $HostNameProp | export-csv c:vm_info.csv