vTesseract

Dexter vs Big Data

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:18:00 -0400

This past weekend the Mrs. and I were enjoying some downtime so we decided to catch up on the last season of Dexter. This isn’t one of those shows that immediately starts making you think about cloud or big data but so is life as an IT guy. I thoroughly enjoy the show but I’ve decided that Dexter shouldn’t still be free. Careful as he is, the viewer watches him leave fatal little breadcrumbs EVERY episode that go unnoticed because no one seems to be looking.

My understanding of big data is that we now have new tools and mechanisms to find meaningful information out of massive amounts of data. This data could come from a variety of sources and the analytics involved would piece together relationships to otherwise trivial data. This moves beyond basic searching and can be quite sophisticated. I am always looking for practical use cases to demonstrate uses of technology to help people I talk with understand what this means. This is where Dexter does me a huge favor!

The Breadcrumbs

Each week we see Dexter tracking down possible murderers. His Code requires that he know that these bad people are in fact guilty and worthy of his “justice”. Well here it’s helpful to be a cop because you have access to all of these nice computer databases and resources. See where I’m going yet? In this particular episode Dexter gets a blood sample from someone who he is certain is a murderer based on small bits of information Dexter gleamed from the case notes (and why no one else figured this out is another problem). He analyzes this blood and compares it to DNA information in another database.

Breadcrumbs:

Dexter searching an old unsolved case. I assume this is a “case” DB
Dexter getting some blood analyzed (not a stretch since he’s a blood guy) which is another DB I’m sure.
Dexter gets a MATCH on an unsolved murder. There must be some cohesion between tools for this handy little interface to show a match!

Wait, What does this have to do with Big Data

Dexter of course acts on his information and dispenses justice, but wait a minute! How is it that no one has caught Dexter? He’s clearly leaving all of the breadcrumbs needed for someone to put the pieces together. He uses department resources to search on presumably bad people. He runs reports that match on old cases. You know that missing persons cases are put in at some point for the people he murders and disposes. Why doesn’t he get caught?

Seems to me that the local or state agency really needs some big data analytics going on here. They need to be looking into these tools for a variety of “flags”. There’s no reason why a system like this couldn’t identify when a match happens on an old case, or if a missing person report shows up for someone that was involved on an old case just days after a previous search or match. I totally forgive the detectives for missing this because on their own much of these logs wouldn’t seem out of place. Dexter is one of them after all. Unfortunately for Dexter I don’t think this is something that would fool a big data tool properly tuned to find these connections. Either that or we’ll need someone like John Nash or Charlie Eppes to solve the case.

Discuss

This post was in part to generate a conversation to help build my understanding of Big Data so please feel free to provide your comments, especially if I’m wrong in my assumption that Dexter’s time is coming where Hadoop catches him. Maybe I should try it with Splunk first. :)

Here’s my G+ post for discussion.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/102722851110632220535/posts/E9d9fvVVvw1

BrownBag Hosting Yet Again

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:41:00 -0400

Last week I had an opportunity to again fill-in host the ProfessionalVMware.com BrownBag, this time with Jake Robinson (@jakerobinson - geekafterfive.com) talking PowerCLI! I managed to start on time, not mute the presenter, and get the recording which you can catch at http://vimeo.com/40199252. It’s a great session and Jake does fantastic job.

Well it would seem that my job wasn’t too terrible because it looks like I’ll be hosting semi-regularly. In fact I’ll be hosting on Wednesday, April 25th with presenter Edward Haletky talking Security (@texiwill http://www.astroarch.com/blog/ and http://virtualizationpractice.com) I’m definitely looking forward to hosting again and I hope you join us!

Update:

Here’s the recording and slides from this session

http://professionalvmware.com/2012/04/vbrownbag-follow-up-cloud-security-w-texiwill/

Remember to Tweet with Hashtag #vBrownBag

Check out previous recordings!

Start-Countdown Function - A Visual for Start-Sleep

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:53:00 -0400

A current project we have is quite large and involved. Part of it requires a series of Start-Sleep commands to slow things down so other items can finish. In some places we monitor for activities to complete but sometimes it’s just easy enough to let it wait.

Wait, What is it doing?

The one complaint I have always had with Start-Sleep is that it NEVER tells you how long you’ve waited, or more importantly how long is left! It just sits there…and waits. You stare at the screen cursing because you’re a scripter and you want it to move on already! :)

I had finally had enough and decided to create a little function that wraps around Start-Sleep and displays the remaining time based on the number of seconds you provide.

function Start-Countdown{

File: 			Start-Countdown.ps1
Date:			2012-04-19
Revision: 		1.0
References:		www.vtesseract.com

====================================================================
Disclaimer: This script is written as best effort and provides no 
warranty expressed or implied. Please contact the author(s) if you 
have questions about this script before running or modifying
====================================================================
#>
Param(
[INT]$Seconds = (Read-Host "Enter seconds to countdown from"),
[Switch]$ProgressBar,
[String]$Message = "Blast Off!"
)
Clear-Host
while ($seconds -ge 1){
If($ProgressBar){
	Write-Progress -Activity "Countdown" -SecondsRemaining $Seconds -Status "Time Remaining"
	Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
}ELSE{
	Write-Output $Seconds
	Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
	Clear-Host
}
$Seconds --
}
Write-Output $Message
}

You have several options here on how it displays.

You can have it clear the screen and display the numeric countdown
You can have a progress bar display the remaining time.

There is no piping on this but now you can put your sleep in your script and see what is going on! Always open to improvements and suggestions! Thanks for reading and may the -Force be with you!

Full code on PoshCode.org http://poshcode.org/3374

Update: Pat Richard (@patrichard) pointed me to a post he did a few months back that’s very similar. Definitely wanted to include so you can see how two folks can solve the same problem slightly differently with PowerShell! Definite value in searching on Google first, even though you do lose that learning feeling! Thanks Pat! http://www.ehloworld.com/878

Note: My coworker, Jade, who blogs over at PowerWTF.com pointed this URL out to me from the ScriptingGuys blog. Learned a few cool things from this article. http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/01/30/provide-progress-for-your-script-with-a-powershell-cmdlet.aspx

I wanted to log in to check out all of the new awesome-sauce in...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:04:00 -0400

I wanted to log in to check out all of the new awesome-sauce in VMware’s MyVMware portal. The folks have done amazing work, but suffice it to say I had a small problem logging in. I chalk it up to browser but it made me chuckle so I needed to share.

Note: If you have this issue just clear out your browser’s cache and things work as they are intended. Huge thanks to @VMwareCares for their quick twitter response to this video!! Well done once again VMware!

#PowerCLI - Save Yourself from Going Loop-y

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:50:00 -0400

I see this often in the PowerCLI community forums and in my day to day job. I need to loop through a variety of VMs, VMhosts, Clusters, etc.

In many respects what I really want to do is grab data from various layers so that I can get a big/full picture about what’s going on. In this post I’ll provide a relatively basic example of how this may come to play and a way that I find myself regularly trying to reduce my lines of code and make resulting code easier to follow by coworkers or future me. It does not always work for everything so know this up front but it’s definitely a good way to start thinking.

Note: I do not make a challenge of reducing my lines of code. PowerShell is already great for that. I do make a challenge of making my code easily consumable for you and future me :)

Loopy Mechanism:

$report = @()
$clusters = Get-cluster
foreach($cluster in $clusters){
$vmhosts = $cluster | Get-VMHost
  foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts){
  $vms = $vmhost | Get-VM
    foreach ($vm in $vms){
     $vminfo = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
	 VM = $vm.Name
	 PowerState = $vm.PowerState
	 VMHost = $vmhost.Name
	 Cluster = $cluster.Name
	 }
	$report += $vminfo
	}
  }
}
$report

In this example you’ll notice that I’ve gathered all of the objects per container. This works for gathering all data but can be a bit time consuming. One nice part about this is that it will be reasonably and neatly organized. In truth I never care about this because it’s simple enough to output the results to a .csv and let excel handle my sorting. It’s really good for that but I digress to a future post.

Note: Hey future me…make sure you link to the post you just posted on when to use other tools rather than PowerShell for filtering and managing data. Yea, I know…blasphemy.

Now here is my less loopy method.

$report = @()
$vms = Get-VM
#Or with Larger Sets perhaps use Get-View
#$vms = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine
foreach ($vm in $vms){
	$vminfo = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
		VM = $vm.Name
		PowerState = $vm.PowerState
		VMHost = $vm.VMHost
		Cluster = Get-Cluster -VM $vm
	}
$report += $vminfo
}
$report

You’ll notice in this example I manage with a single loop. I simply collect all of the VMs at the beginning (noting I show both mechanisms for doing this depending on your patience and environment size). Once I have gathered all of the VMs it is simply a task of extracting the necessary data from those objects.

Wait Just a Second!

I bet you saw where I gathered the cluster info I did a Get-Cluster call. Wait a second there Josh!? Seems like that would take a lot of time to make those calls! I don’t have metrics on that but have found that calls on high level objects like this run pretty quickly given that there are much fewer of these objects to look through. If you really wanted to of course you could start the whole thing with a $clusters loop, but now you’ve just started getting loopy again! :)

Wait Just another Second

Excellent readers Shay and Harold pointed out that I didn’t follow my own advice! He is absolutely correct in the comments that in order to get the cluster I could simply use $vm.VMhost.Parent instead of making a new call. Thanks Harold for pointing out my miss!

$report = @()

	$vminfo = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
		VM = $vm.Name
		PowerState = $vm.PowerState
		VMHost = $vm.VMHost
		Cluster = $vm.VMhost.Parent
	}

Conclusion

I’m always open to hear how you solve similar challenges. In the end I try to use the available PSObject data that is provided to gather my information. After all, you have spent the cycles gathering that data, why look for it again or make numerous smaller calls? Also, don’t forget about your PowerCLI ExtensionData!! Thanks for Reading! May the -Force be with you.

Photo credit chrisescars.com

vExpert 2012

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:49:04 -0400

Woke up this morning to some pleasant news, which of course what I consider to be the best kind of news!

I have been selected as a vExpert for 2012! Very cool!

While this recognition isn’t likely to get me a raise it does provide more encouragement to continue to share and contribute to the VMware community.

Some Thoughts

It wouldn’t be a vTesseract post if I didn’t include some of my thoughts on this community recognition. I think the work that Alex and John do for this community award is fantastic! I do wonder at what point it might become over-saturated and its value diluted. This is not to say that those who have been awarded this distinction did not earn it, but I will be the first to say that I do not feel like my contributions measured up equally to many others who have received this award. The number of people contributing to the community has grown dramatically over the last few years and his has clearly contributed to VMware’s success. Still out of the contributors there are some clear standouts.

Over the coming year as I start to be included in the vExpert “perks” I’ll definitely be putting thought to blog/email/littlewhitenapkinsatweddings about how I think the recognition could really differentiate those who do amazing and excellent work year after year. Trust me, the guys who have several years of vExpert on their belt provide incredible content, of which I still aspire. I am certainly humbled to be included in such a group.

Josh, vExpert 2013 will require continued Posting

I have received more than a couple of messages asking where I’ve been for the last 2 months and why so little has been added to this blog. I refer you to my last post http://www.vtesseract.com/post/20153417679/where-you-been and to let you know I haven’t abandoned everyone. I’m still working on content though my time is very limited right now with our pending baby #2 on his way in the next few weeks! Mama has been having a rough time but both are healthy and doing well! Still working on the name Anakin or Mal but I think I’ll get vetoed. Maybe she’d go for Maritz Herrod Atwell? Too far? Probably so. LOL

I am still learning. I am still writing. I am still working hard with the community through Twitter, User Groups, and lately participating more with the ProfessionalVMware.com BrownBags. I’m still here and hopefully soon I’ll add more blog publishing to the list. My role at Cisco does have me working on many things which I can’t publish on, but I’m going to be working that out as I go to make sure that as I learn things I can pass them on to you!

Just between you and me…I may be working on publishing something else too, but that’s for another post. ;)

Thanks for reading and thanks to VMware for selecting me as a vExpert for 2012. Looking forward to the bag and licenses…though this will not stop my push for #VMTNSubscriptionMovement!! We need it! Make it happen!

Anakin Photo Credit http://www.starwarstheoldrepublic.info/

Where You Been?

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:03:00 -0400

Well readers I want to say first off that I’m really sorry for the long delay between posts. I assure you it’s bothered me quite a bit not posting in so long. In fact today I had a super nice guy stop me at a conference and introduce himself. He informed me that he was a regular reader of my blog. HUGELY appreciative to have someone who reads want to take the time to introduce themselves and chat with me!! This makes me ache even more for some new content but in short I’ve been needing to spend considerably more time helping out around the house and wrapping up some user group craziness in March.

I was asked back in February to help take a more active role in the NC UCS Users Group that is getting under way. The first couple of meetings have gone well. Naturally I’m anxious to learn more about UCS and even give back to the community as well so this has been a fun experience for me helping start another users group.

I created a short presentation to introduce the Cisco UCSPowerTool. I feel the presentations went pretty well and gave folks a good start for getting it downloaded and trying it out. Here’s a link to the Sliderocket deck:

http://portal.sliderocket.com/BLRCP/Introducing-Cisco-UCSPowerTool

OK, enough of all that craziness. The big change for me starts this Friday as I begin my first day as a Cisco employee. I have been assigned to Cisco since January while working at CH Reynolds and will be maintaining the same role with the same team. My time with CH Reynolds has been very positive and I’m glad I’ll still get to work with all of those folks on a regular basis.

I’m not 100% sure how much impact this change will have on my activities. My bet is not a whole lot since most of my blog work will continue to focus on scripting and VMware. In fact perhaps getting increased exposure to UCS will cause me to write more about it though I sure that will still be limited to UCSPowerTool. :) I do know that this will impact my VMUG participation quite a bit so I’ll be working that out over the coming weeks.

I am very fortunate to have a manager who is very supportive of my community activities so after this baby makes its appearance and things “settle” into our new routine be prepared for a great deal of new content from me. Until then please be patient and know I’ve not dropped off, just taking care of much needed business. I’m still very available via twitter at @josh_atwell and you are welcome to email me at josh dot c dot atwell at gmail dot com. Thanks for reading!

Top Blogging Results - Cooking with Gas

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:32:22 -0500

Earlier today the results were released for the vSphereLand top blog voting. Once again the community spoke and I think they did a fantastic job with the top 25. I had a special interest this year as you may know since I am now a blogger and vTesseract.com was on the ballot for the best new blog. Here’s how vTesseract.com fared:

#2 Best New Blog

#8 Scripting Blog

#73 Overall (out of 187)

If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that this has been quite an experience for me since starting vTesseract.com back in May 2011. I can not thank those who took the time to vote for this blog enough. I am very excited about some things I have in the works for 2012 and I hope you continue to read.

Now that my wife realizes people actually read my blog that consumes so much of my time at times I am hoping that I’ll be given some time this spring when our 2nd son is born. Just in case, have no fear because I am working on stuff in the hopes that I can keep the content sharing coming. As my blogging “cloud-buddy” Bilal said “I will have to start being more efficient with the diapers now so I can spend more time on the blogs” I have the diapering down pat so hope that I’ll fare well come spring.

Thanks for reading!

See the full list of top blogs and categories http://vsphere-land.com/news/top-blog-2012-results.html

VCP5 Section 6 - Troubleshooting

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:26:00 -0500

Hopefully you’re already a avid follower of the ProfessionalVMware.com #BrownBag sessions. I mentioned them here back in October as well as in my VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD exam experiences. In fact if it weren’t for the amazingly supportive participants of the BrownBag series I would have probably never attempted the VCAP exams.

It is time for me to give back. This upcoming Wednesday’s BrownBag session will be hosted by yours truly. I will be discussing Section 6 of the VCP5 blueprint, Troubleshooting. Make sure you register! See you Wednesday night at 8pm EST/ 7PM CST!

View the BrownBag Recording

http://professionalvmware.com/2012/02/brownbag-follow-up-vcp5-objective-6-w-josh-atwell/

Slides Used
http://portal.sliderocket.com/BLRCP/BrownBag-VCP5-Section-6

Links

http://www.professionalvmware.com/brownbags

http://professionalvmware.com/2012/02/brownbagvcp5-objective-6-josh_atwell/

http://damiankarlson.com/2012/02/13/brownbag-vcp-5-section-6-with-josh_atwell/

UCS - Remove Role #PowerShell Script

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:50:23 -0500

I have been reading up and browsing the Cisco UCS PowerTool to learn about all the many cool new cmdlets available. I recently upgraded to version 0.9.6.0 which has over 1400 cmdlets! Whoa! That’s just a few more than the 149 that were released last year. Make sure you read my earlier post talking about the beta version 0.9.6.0 release.

Clearly I have only scratched the surface in my “tinkering” but last week I got my first real request for making changes in our substantially large UCS environment. As always I will eliminate any specifics and go to the root. We had a role on a large number of UCS systems that we didn’t need/want any longer. Manually this would take forever so to PowerShell we go! The UCSPowerTool makes this super easy!

The following script allows you to import a list of all of your UCSMs and remove a specified role. I have set a Test-Role and a temp location for the import file. You will want to replace these values for your own usage. I have included screenshots at the end of this post! Enjoy and may the -force be with you!

<#
====================================================================
Author(s):	Josh Atwell 
 				
File: 		UCS-Remove-Role.ps1
Purpose: 	Removes user specified role from each UCSM listed.
 
Date:		2012-01-31
Notes:		1. This script requires the UCSPowerTool 0.9.6.0
		2. Provide list of UCSMs to connect to.  
		3. Specify Role you wish to have removed from each.
References:	http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/microsoft 
====================================================================
Disclaimer: This script is written as best effort and provides no 
warranty expressed or implied. Please contact the author(s) if you 
have questions about this script before running or modifying
====================================================================
#>
#	Begin User Input
$file = "C:\Temp\ucspe.txt"
$role = "Test-Role"
#	End User Input

#	Load CiscoUcsPS Module if Needed
If ((Get-Module "CiscoUcsPS" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null) {
Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Cisco\Cisco UCS PowerTool\CiscoUcsPS.psd1"
}

#	Capture credentials to be used for all UCSM Connections.
$cred = Get-Credential

Foreach($ucs in Get-Content $file){
Connect-UCS $ucs -Credential $cred
Write-Host "Removing role $role on $ucs"
Get-UcsRole $role | Remove-UcsRole -Force 
Disconnect-UCS
}
#	End Script

You can see the Test-Role

From UCS PowerTool

The script will prompt for your credentials. In a later post I will demonstrate how you can make this easier. You can also get that information from the Users Guide available for download with the 0.9.6.0 zip file.

And that’s all there is to it! The script even disconnects that session. Again, there are easier ways for managing your connections and credentials but that will be for a later post.

And there you have it. Your Test-Role has been removed!

VCAP-DCD5 Beta Exam Invitations Released

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:06:00 -0500

Earlier this evening while playing “Go to sleep daddy so I can stick my finger up your nose” with my 2yo I received my invitation to sit the VCAP5-DCD. Needless to say I’m exhausted from thinking about certification exams but I’m going to give it a go before the deadline of March 2. Definitely looking forward to getting it out of the way and seeing what VMware is offering up with the new version.

I do want to mention a something that I am a little “meh” about.

This is coming really late with respect to the required VCP4 to VCP5 upgrade requirement without coursework. I would have really liked to have seen VMware release VCAP5’s with some overlap. Why? Because I’d love to upgrade my VCAPs and have my VCP upgrade as well. Call me silly but I’m pretty sure if you’re taking a VCAP then the VCP isn’t supposed to be a challenge and then becomes just another couple hundred bucks and many hours down the drain.

Update: Upon further reflection the fact that I was invited without having my VCP5 yet gives me hope. In fact it does state in the blueprint that for a period of time there is no requirements for upgrade.

My complaint is that there is no overlap or announcement about the potential of this being the case. My disappointment is that now many folks eligible for VCAP5-DCD are already having to worry about VCP5 upgrade if they haven’t done it already (and haven’t taken “What’s New” - which fortunately I got an opportunity to take)

This is my first beta exam opportunity and I plan on taking it, and hopefully passing. As such I’m going to ditch my VCP5 exam attempt next week and just work on this exam. I would love to not have to worry about the VCP5 at all and give my poor brain a rest, but I’ll do what I have to do. I wish the other beta invitees the best on this and the VCP5 if you haven’t taken it already.

Update: Started looking at the blueprint and this one is going to be another excellent challenge. Well done VMware team!

Well, time to get to reading. I need to make sure I know how to design with all of these amazing new features! Thanks for reading!

UCSPowerTool New Build 0.9.6.0 Released

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:15:26 -0500

Hi Scripters! I got excellent news today! Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing a great deal of work with the Cisco UCSPowerTool which provides PowerShell functionality for managing your Cisco UCS server environment. I began using this tool last summer with a simple 149 cmdlets. It provided some functionality but left entirely too much requiring XML calls. The latest beta release, v0.9.6.0, is now available with over 1400 cmdlets!!

I will be doing quite a bit of work with this tool over the coming months and plan to post scripts that we find useful. Now that this later release is now available all scripts I write will run on this version until further notice.

I have seen some extremely amazing things available through this tool so make sure you read the Getting Started Guide and stay tuned here for more scripts and resources.

You can download the UCSPowerTool and Getting Started guide from

http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/microsoft

This requires a Cisco Developer Network login to download.

May the -force be with you!

vCloud Director - You Certifiable?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:51:52 -0500

I saw recently posted on Twitter that VMware will be releasing a vCloud Director certification. http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/01/vcloud-director-certification.html

Initial comments seemed to be mixed, including a comment about how this seemed pointless. I do not wholly disagree with this sentiment but my bet is that this is going to be part of a much bigger picture. I anticipate that this certification is going to be a valuable step towards the next level of VCDX defense. I recall hearing rumor at some point that future VCDX submissions will require addressing cloud design and technologies. I do not have direct evidence to support this mind you.

If this is the case then I definitely welcome a vCloud Director certification. If not then I question the reader…Will this have value? Interested in your feedback as well as future information released from VMware.

Note: I get the impression that more certification news may be forthcoming from VMware during PEX next month. I hope this is the case as I’m needing to figure out what my VCDX track may look like later this year! I’ll try to make sure to post something once this information has been released. Thanks for reading!

VCP 5 Certification Guide from @VMwarePress - Early Review

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:17:30 -0500

Being a SafariBooksOnline subscriber was a tough choice for me initially even though it was part of my desire to go all digital as I describe in a previous post. My primary hesitation was whether or not I’d actually use it enough to justify the cost. Well, I’m several months in and I’d say that I definitely got my money’s worth so far just in the amount of resources that were readily available to me on my iPad and PC while preparing for the VCAPs and now the VCP5.

One key book for me was access to Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere 5 book. I’ll be purchasing this one with tokens once it is released to do so but in the mean time it’s been another example of Scott’s excellent work. While perusing for new releases I happened by one that I had never expected: VMware Press’s rough cut for The Official VCP 5 Certification Guide by Bill Ferguson. This is the first book that I can think of that is officially sanctioned by VMware as a certification preparation material and I am ALL for it!

I immediately added it to my Virtualization folder and loaded it up on the iPad (my Safari reader of choice). I was instantly engaged when I saw the “Do I Know This Already?” quizzes at the beginning of each section. One of my biggest challenges in exam prep is studying. In the past I have almost solely relied on sheer experience (which has served me well) but the VCP5 involves a ton of tech new to me. The question seem to resemble what I would expect from the actual course (though perhaps easier). After jotting down my answers for the first section imagine my surprise when I didn’t find any answers!!!!! Now how do I know if I need to read this section!?!

No worries, this is a rough cut so I’m not going to be upset about this at all. I’m sure Appendix A will show up eventually! :) I will be politely requesting from VMware Press to release Appendix A answers for the chapters provided in the Rough Cut.

Content

The book in many ways feels much like most study aids I’ve seen except much easier to read and follow. Also it feels much more personal, including part about exposed “license key” in one of the sections being WAY expired. :) As I’ve continued reading I’ve found a variety of useful tidbits that have filled in small gaps in my knowledge of vSphere 5 as well as provide something I expect will show up on the exam.

There were several times while reading that I felt the content jumped around. At first this bothered be a fair bit until the author makes note that he is more or less following the blueprint provided by VMware for the certification exam. Once that was mentioned I found the shifts a little less disruptive since my expectation had changed, but not ideal as a cover to cover read. I wouldn’t suggest making any changes to this format however because I think the real value here is that you can quickly locate the necessary content for a specific objective on the blueprint without a great deal of effort.

Another facet of this book I really liked were the figures. The images were well chosen in most cases and provide quick glimpse into where to locate information in the vSphere client or elsewhere in the environment. One of my favorite figures was the one illustrating different cloud services. Well done folks!

I’m not going to go deeper on content in this post since this is a Rough Cut and I want to show true deference to the author and publisher in their efforts. I can see that this book is going to be an excellent resource for those preparing for the VCP5. Now if only it were done before next week when I take mine!

#PowerShell - Export-CSV without the Comma - Changing Delimiters

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:00:05 -0500

One of my favorite parts of my job is the regular need to gather and conform data. Actually it can be a real pain sometimes but it’s usually an interesting challenge. I came across this issue several months ago when trying to generate a function that would format the data output so that it could be imported into another tool. I can’t go into specifics about this but I can highlight something really cool I learned.

The data output needed to be in tab delimited format. Clearly this is a common form since it is the default option when importing data into Excel.

Unfortunately I did not see an Export-TSV cmdlet so I poked around at how I might go about creating this output. Thankfully I ran Get-Help against Export-CSV and lo and behold!

But wait! There’s a stipulation!

So it appears that a character is required in order to use a specialized delimiter! Well that makes since but how am I supposed to use a tab then? I pulled out my handy sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the internet. It grabbed a list of the special characters recognized by PowerShell. [Note: I wish I did have a sonic screwdriver.]

The following special characters are recognized by Windows PowerShell:

        `0    Null
        `a    Alert
        `b    Backspace
        `f    Form feed
        `n    New line
        `r    Carriage return
        `t    Horizontal tab
        `v    Vertical tab

    These characters are case-sensitive.

from <http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347558.aspx>

Looks like `t is the one I’m looking for so I plugged it into a test one-liner for validation.

Get-Process | Export-Csv -Delimiter “`t” -Path “C:\Temp\TabTest.txt” -NoTypeInformation

Worked like a charm. We’ve since used that function for many things in order to grab information and pull it into our application. Now our PowerShell/PowerCLI scripting initiatives fall right in line with existing tools and has made adoption that much easier! I think I would have made PowerCLI Man proud!

More #PoshFun - Join Us!

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:44:00 -0500

The popularity and fun I’ve been having with creating pseudo #powershell scripts has started to spread. Not only am I writing more of them every day but I’m seeing many others as well. Recently Cody Bunch and I spat a few back and forth and it looks like we’ve settled on the Twitter hashtag of #PoshFun for these little scripts. I figured I might as well post some of the more recent ones. I have a feeling I’ll be doing this periodically. Since I want there to be a “learning” element to this I’ll try to find clever ways of demonstrating PowerShell functionality when I am able. In the end I’m going to go where geek culture and humor take me. I invite you to join in! Post your #PoshFun in the comments and on twitter with the #PoshFun hashtag!

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Get-Rings | where{$_.rule -eq “all” -and $_.findthem -eq $true} | Bring-All | Bind-All -destination “Darkness”

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$thelove = (get-feeling).type

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Get-Dork | where{$_.name -match “Josh”}

Courtesy of my wife :)

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Get-Jungle “The” | Write-Host “Welcome to $_”

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Hey-Sister -Size “Little” | Get-One “Want” | Hey-Sister -Size “Little” | Write-Host “Shot gun!”

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Get-Restaurant -Location (Get-Universe -Location “End”)

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#BrownBag #PoshFun

if ( $vcp -ne 5) { Get-BrownBag -location “http://bit.ly/z3ugke” -time “7PM CST”}

From Cody Bunch

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$timetilbrownbag = (Get-Date “1/26/2012 1am”) - (Get-Date).ToUniversalTime()

Clone-List #PowerCLI Function

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:49:35 -0500

If you’ve been managing a virtual environment for any period of time you’ve probably received this email:

Josh,

Next week we plan to do an upgrade for XXX application and would like a clone of the following servers to kick off the upgrade window.

bigapp-db
bigapp-web01
bigapp-web02
bigapp-web03
bigapp-file01
bigapp-…01
bigapp-…09

KThanksBye

Person

I recently got this request for a large application group and decided to write a PowerCLI function that could take that list and make clones dynamically. This function works for both live and cold clones.

Check out my doc on the VMware community forum and to download the script.

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-18155

Thanks. May the -force be with you!

2012 Vote for the Top Virtualization Blogs!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:04:48 -0500

It’s that time of year again. Election time. No, not for POTUS, but for vSphere-Land’s vLaunchPad top Blog award! I have to say that the work that Eric Siebert does every year to update and maintain the vLaunchPad is tremendous. He certainly deserves a great deal of appreciation for his work. The usefulness and quality of content is precisely the reason why I have kept it as my browser home screen for several years. OK, here’s the link before I start rambling. :)

http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-the-top-vmware-virtualization-blogs.html

Note: Please feel free to continue reading after the image.

Thoughts from Josh

This year is quite different for me since I have a blog that is considered for voting. During my voting I had an impossible time picking 10 top blogs to be considered for the top 25. It is an amazingly daunting task given the number of strong blogs out there with amazing contributors. I can’t lie, this year I voted for someone other than Duncan for the #1 spot but as I always say “I can always count on two people thinking what I do is excellent…me and my mom.” In truth I feel that my choice was appropriate since while I have learned so much from so many on the list, my own experience blogging over the last year has driven me to learn more, share more, think more, and do more.

I am certainly not expecting anyone other than me (or mom…meh, not likely) to choose my blog as one of their ten. I would love, however, to be considered for one of the categories that I’m eligible for: New Blogger and Scripting. Even with those categories there are some amazing contributors…shucks I just like being part of the community!

Please do take a moment and cast your votes. The folks listed in this “election” are extremely hardworking individuals who expend a great deal of time, energy, and resources in order to share their knowledge and experience with others. I know this now more than I ever did before. Seriously, some of these folks are just flat out amazing. Thanks for reading. Go Vote! http://vote.vsphere-land.com/

P.S. This year TrainSignal is giving away some of their vSphere 5 and VMware View training courses to random voters.

In this video I quickly (and silently) demonstrate how to remove...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:00:05 -0500

In this video I quickly (and silently) demonstrate how to remove all default “VM Network” portgroups from each ESX(i) host’s standard switches.

I come across this issue all of the time when going into new environments or most recently when building my homelab. I tend to set up an individual vSwitch for my virtual machines with portgroups for different VLANs and as such never use the “VM Network” portrgroup.

You will note in the video that I run the one-liner and receive a confirmation notification. I chose to back out and demonstrate how to suppress this notification using the -Confirm:$false parameter.

Here is the full one-liner with the suppression of confirmation:

Get-VMhost | Get-VirtualPortGroup -VirtualSwitch vSwitch0 -Name “VM Network” | Remove-VirtualPortGroup -Confirm:$false

More #PowerShell Fun - Star Wars

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:21:45 -0500

It’s become a little joy of mine to make up funny cmdlets. These are not actual scripts that you can run but mainly a demonstration of ways you can describe the world with PowerShell

Get-DeathStar | Get-Target -Type “ExhaustVent” | Where{$_.Size -like “WompRat”} | Set-Fire -Type “NotImpossible”

Another new classic.

$search = Get-Droids | Where{$_ -notnear $jedi} ` If($search -eq $null){Move-Along}

Sometimes when I write #PowerShell, I use the -force

P.S.

I would also like to share a little script I found today and inspired me to publish these one-liners today. Thanks for the contribution Zach (@WIDBA)!

http://widba.blogspot.com/2011/09/quoting-star-wars-out-loud-on-your-pc.html