Virtu-Al PowerPack – A must-have tool for VMware

PowerPack Challenge 2009 got its first contestant and it is absolutely fantastic.

If you are an administrator managing VMware infrastructure – this is a great free addition to your arsenal. Just look at the screenshot of the navigation tree. The tool is just an amazing collection of super-useful reports on VMware hosts, guest machines, datacenter, resource pools and clusters, and goes beyond that by adding licensing information and even a virtualization tip of the day!

You can download Alan’s PowerPack here. Read more about the pack and send your feedback here.

Good thing there’s more than one prize for the contest. So if you are into PowerShell and have a great idea of a tool to make someone’s life easier – go for it – create your PowerPack and submit it to the contest!

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization
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Free virtualization Visio stencil

Need to create cool-looking Visio diagrams for your virtual, VMware, Hyper-V, etc. infrastructure? You can actually get one for free!

The folks at VESI (Virtualization EcoShell Initiative) have shared the stencil they are using for Visio reporting (the same stencil is also used in PowerGUI’s VMware PowerPack). Just go to the VESI downloads page, scroll to the bottom of the page and download the stencil!

Tags: Freeware, Hyper-V, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization, Visio
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PowerScripting podcast on VESI

Jonathan and Hal have just posted the recording of the podcast they had with Scott Herold – virtualization guru who helped us a lot with VMware PowerPack who is currently working on Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI).

• What is the difference between PowerGUI and VESI?
• Does VESI support PowerGUI enterprise features such as interface lockdown and central distribution?
• Will VESI support Hyper-V and Xen?

Learn this and much more here.

Tags: Hyper-V, PowerGUI, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization, podcast
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PowerShell Hyper-V/SCVMM Webcast

On April 23, 2009 Marco Shaw, Darin Pendergraft, and Peter Zerger are giving a TechNet webcast on “Using Windows PowerShell with Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager“:

Windows PowerShell is likely to become the automation tool of choice. In this webcast, we provide examples of Windows PowerShell being used to perform common administration tasks in Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. We compare the two automation methods in detail, and we discuss some online community-focused PowerShell resources such as http://powershellcommunity.org.

Learn more about the webcast and register here.

PowerGUI featured in Gartner report. Twice.

We knew this was coming but it is still very exciting: Gartner has released a report which for the first time mentions PowerGUI. The report is “Q&A on Server Virtualization Management Freeware” and provides a list of key free tools for virtualization management.

The report lists both Hyper-V PowerPack and VMware Infrastructure PowerPack as free virtualization tools worth checking out.

Congratulations to Kirk, Scott, and everyone else who contributed to the packs!

Tags: Hyper-V, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization
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Hal’s VMware PowerShell Book Out

Or almost out – you can pre-order it for $41.99. Estimated ship date is mid-April.

VMware is one of the key PowerShell-enabled platforms out there and it is great to finally see a comprehensive book on the topic.

And – what makes me personally particularly happy is that one of the chapters is specifically on VMware management with PowerGUI.

Congratulations to Hal! Getting a book like this out is a major undertaking!

See Hal’s blog for more details on the book and order it right away.

A must-attent UG next week

Thursday, Mar 26, 2009 PowerShell Usergroup in UK is having one of the most information-packed events ever. The agenda includes:

• Jonathan Medd speaking on AD cmdlets,
• Alan Renouf on VMware and PowerShell, and
• Richard Siddaway on Regular Expressions.

The event starts at 6 pm GMT (attention: UK and Europe is not yet on daylight savings time so the time difference for North America is 1 hour less than usual: if I do my math right the event start time is 2 pm EDT and 11 am PDT).

For those of us connecting remotely, Richard has LiveMeeting info on his blog.

Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization
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VMware PowerPack with Visio Integration

Kirk has published version 2.1.5 of PowerGUI’s VMware PowerPack.

The biggest new feature is ability to create a Visio diagram for any part of your infrastructure:

This is based on Alan’s earlier Visio scripts enhanced by Kirk. Great example of community collaboration!

Read more about the update in Alan’s and Kirk’s blogs, get the updated pack here.

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization
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Virtualization EcoShell Initiative

At VMworld Europe Scott Herold has started talking about the new project he started based on the PowerGUI admin console – Virtualization EcoShell Initiative. Check out his blog post here or Eric Sloof’s one (with actually far more information) here. The project site also appears to be live now.

Obviously, if you are at VMworld this week, don’t spend you time reading these and instead go to the Vizioncore booth and press Scott for details.

Cool to see PowerGUI getting used in more and more projects!

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization
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PowerShell Ecosystem vs. Perl

Edward Haletky (aka @texiwill) has just published a really interesting story of how he got converted to PowerShell thanks to the rich ecosystem we have.

He started with Perl:

I wrote a Perl application that would log in to an ESX host, run an assessment of its configuration and from there aid me in judging the security of the host and some smaller parts of the virtual environment. Since it was written in Perl, it would be hard to get people to use excepting myself and other Perl users. This breed is found mostly within the Linux world; many VMware infrastructure administrators may not understand Perl well as it comes with a learning curve.

Then he found:

• PowerShell
• VI Toolkit
• PowerGUI
• PowerShell IRC channel, Jaykul there who pointed him to SharpSSH client project at SourceForge,
• Scott Herold and PowerGUI’s VMware PowerPack,
• Alan Renouf’s vDiagram script

They all combined are solving Edward’s tasks. Quite a success story for the PowerShell ecosystem! Read the whole story here.

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, VMware, Virtualization
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