What are your (beta testers) Plans for the VI Toolkit?

[bshell]

I am personally very glad to be here and I am excited that VMWare has jumped on full board with the Powershell wave.

[rfoust]

I'll probably start by making quick scripts to add new VMs of a specific configuration. We also assign static MAC addresses to our VMs so it is good to see a cmdlet that provides this functionality. So far we have been using a 3rd party utility to do this since the console doesn't have that option.

The cmdlets will also be useful for auditing...but I'll have to think about how I want to approach it before I write any scripts for that.

- Robbie

[halr9000]

Oh, hey guys.

I have much thinking to do on this question, but most of what I've done so far is VM snapshot and power state scripting. I am really waiting for the next release when we get host mgmt stuff, that's something I'm very interested in.

[admin]

Anyone else mind sharing their plans or what they'd like to see or do?

Antonio (VMware developer)

[DylanBright]

Do to some "creative" design decisions early on in our implementation, we have a lot of datastores. As we fix those creative decisions, we are accumulating quite a few of datastores that are no longer in use. I wrote a little script to help me identify datastores without VMs.

#Outputs a list of unused datastores

ForEach ($ds in get-datastore) {

1. I like output in objects

$Output = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSObject

Add-Member -InputObject $Output NoteProperty DataStoreName $ds.Name

#This will tell us if any VMs see the datastore.

$VMs = get-vm -Datastore $ds

If ($VMs){

Add-Member -InputObject $Output NoteProperty HasVMs "Yes"

}Else{

Add-Member -InputObject $Output NoteProperty HasVMs "No"

}

$Output

}

[halr9000]

• automating the recycling of dev environments we have to rebuild every month. That means trashing the VMs and creating new ones from a template, then configuring some things within the VM. (We've found for perf reasons these boxes don't do well with 30-day old snapshots.)

• I do create a lot of snapshots, so managing these will be important.

• I want to be able to easily apply common configuration settings across many VMs like resource limits.

• Perf reporting

[trojanjo]

1. We are a VAC partner. I would like to create some functions to collect data from multiple client sites, then schedule updates to that data. Since we support a number of clients with different setups it would be nice for us to have current info on Hosts, VM's, and resources, etc...

2. For VDI POC and Pilots it would be good to deploy a bunch of vm's from templates, monitor them, then get rid of them when we are finished. So I can have sort of a turn-key way to deploy an entire solution, keeping things standard, and be as effecient as possible.

3. Last, I come from a Network Admin background so I like to make repetitive tasks go away.