Automating VM deployment with conditions

[bolsen]

I hope someone can help me automate our VM deployments.  I have most of the script done but I need help with a few things.

Here's what I'm trying to automate:

• Prestage VMs in a specific folder for users to take at will. 
  

The exiting process:

• Check folder and confirm there are at least 3 VMs available.  If not, manually deploy the VM from template.
  
• Enter the VM name based on the next available number sequence (userx122, userx123, userx124, etc),
  
• Choose the customization specification
  
• Select the datastore with the most free space. 
  
  • Conditions = Datastore name must start with USER and it must have more than 100GB of free space.
    
• Press finish.
  

I need help with:

• Syntax to determine the new VM name
  
• Syntax to select the datastore based on the conditions.
  

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Hosted201110141]

Could you post what you have already?

[mattboren]

Hello, bolsen-

To get the two items you mentioned, how about:

## Syntax to determine the new VM name
## get the number portion of the currently highest numbered userx* VM
$intCurrentHighestNum = Get-VM userx* | Select name | %{if ($_ -match "\d+") {[int]$Matches[0]}} | Sort-Object -Descending | Select -First 1
## make a string to use for the next sequential VM name
$strNextVMName = "userx$($intCurrentHighestNum + 1)"

## Syntax to select the datastore whose name starts with USER, has the most free space, and has at least 100GB free
#   will be the given datastore object if one that meets all of the criteria exists, else it will be $null
$dstDatastoreToUse = Get-Datastore -Name user* | Sort FreeSpaceMB -Descending | Select -First 1 | ?{$_.FreeSpaceMB -gt 100*1kb}

Let us know how that does.

[bolsen]

Thanks for the help.  I've almost got it working but I could use help with two other things:

1. Is it possible to dynamically select the -vmhost value based on certain requirements?  For example, I have two clusters and I want to select a host within the cluster with most free CPU resources and free disk space.

2. Stupid question but how to I power on the machine after it's been deployed.  There must be a way to take the results of the new-vm command, specifically the name value, and apply that to a "get-vm | somethingsomething | start-vm"

[LucD]

1) Try something like this

$esx = Get-Cluster MyCluster | Get-VMHost | Sort-Object -Property CpuUsageMhz | Select -First 1

It will provide you with the host that uses the least CPU resources in the cluster

Similarly for the datastore you can do

$ds = Get-Cluster MyCluster | Get-VMHost | Select -First 1 | Get-Datastore | where {$_.Extensiondata.Summary.MultipleHostAccess -and $_.Type -eq "VMFS"} | Sort-Object FreeSpaceMB -Descending | select -First 1

2) You can capture the output from the New-VM cmdlet and use that object in the Start-VM cmdlet

New-VM .... | Start-VM -Confirm:$false

or

$vm = New-VM ....

Start-VM -VM $vm -Confirm:$false

[bolsen]

Thanks to everyone for their help, here's the script I have so far:

EDIT: Removed script because it had some typos in it.  I'll re-upload it after I add some of the features below.

Next I plan to make the following enhancements (help is always needed )

• Insert another condition to only deploy a machine if there are less than 3 VMs in the _UnderConstruction folder.
  
• Add error reporting and email notifications.
  
  • If no datastores have free space, send an email saying the deployment can't finish because no space exists.
    
• Insert a condition to check the VM name.
  
  • If the number within the VM name is more than 25 "Counts" higher than the second highest number, then send an email alert and exit script.
    
    • On occasion we deploy test VMs with a very high number - the script sees this and selects the next highest number (which we don't want because it will mess up the "production" numbering scheme.