vExpert recognition for 2014

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I am very honored to have received VMware vExpert recognition for 2014 (the third year running now). Keeping this blog updated with new content has proven a difficult task as of late with many more work and personal commitments on the go, in addition to a second blog I started relating to my hobby of game development (and coding).

Hopefully I can maintain momentum here on Shogan.tech and keep posting content related to IT, Automation, cloud, virtualisation and scripting though!

Congratulations to all the vExperts for 2014 (both new and returning) then – it is great to see such an enthusiastic community out there!

Upgrading to VMware Fusion 6.x from 5.x – Windows 8 UI font/size change strangeness

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This is a very quick post today, but relates to an issue I had after upgrading my VMware Fusion install from 5.x to 6.0.2.

I am running a Windows 8 SP1 guest VM for development purposes on my mac, and right after upgrading and booting my Windows VM noticed this. The issue is that all the Windows UI elements – icons, text, etc look humongous on my 1920×1200 LCD monitor. The macbook’s LCD itself looked OK though. You can’t really see it that well in the screenshot below, but trust me, the section below with a few icons was about a quarter of my screen.

resolution-issue

I knew this was a new setting that had somehow been toggled in Fusion since the upgrade, so I had a quick look around and found it. To disable this feature, go to your Virtual Machine Settings -> Display, and untick “Automatically adjust user interface size in Windows”.

automatically-adjust-user-interface-size-windows

Fusion will prompt you to logout of your current user session in the Windows VM. After logging back in again, things should be back to normal.

Hope that saves someone 15 minutes of looking for the cause in the future!

Three PowerCLI scripts for information gathering – VMs, Hosts, etc

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I was on a vSphere upgrade review engagement recently, and part of this involved checking hardware and existing vSphere VI was compatible with the targeted upgrade.

To help myself along, I created a few PowerCLI scripts to help with information gathering to CSV for the VI parts – such as Host Versions, build numbers, VMware tools and hardware versions, etc… These scripts were built to run once-off, simply either by copy/pasting them into your PowerCLI console, or by running them from the PowerCLI console directly.

They can easily be adapted to collect other information relating to VMs or hosts. To run, just launch PowerCLI, connect to the VC in question (using Connect-VIServer) and then copy/paste these into the console. The output will be saved to CSV in the directory you were in. Just make sure you unblock the zip file once downloaded if you execute them directly from PowerCLI, otherwise the copy/paste option mentioned above will work fine too.

There are three scripts bundled in the zip file:

  • Gather all hosts under the connected vCenter server and output Host name, Model and Bios version results to PowerCLI window and CSV
  • Gather all hosts under the connected vCenter server and output Host name, Version and Build version results to PowerCLI window and CSV
  • Gather all hosts under the specified DC and output VM name and hardware version results to PowerCLI window and CSV

Short and simple scripts, but hopefully they will come in handy to some. As mentioned above, these can easily be extended to fetch other information about items in your environment. Just take a look at the way existing info is fetched, and adapt from there. Also remember that using | gm (get-member) on objects in PowerShell is your friend – you can discover all the properties and methods on PowerShell objects by using this, and use those to enhance your reports/outputs in your scripts.

[wpdm_package id=’2025′]

 

Updated: Get VMware tools versions by ESXi host version – a PowerCLI function to map tools version codes to readable version numbers

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Quite some time ago I created a PowerCLI function to help me determine VMware Tools versions of queried VMs using PowerCLI. The tools version is returned as a 4 digit number by the vSphere API, and subsequently, so does PowerCLI. This makes determining VMware Tools versions at a glance, a bit of a hassle.

The original function was able to output Tools versions up to ESXi 4.1 u1 or u2, and this week was the first time I had a good use case for this script. I needed more up to date mappings, so I have updated the function to work with VMware tools versions all the way up to ESXi 5.5 now.

Here is the latest script:

# Mapping file found at: http://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions

Function Get-VMToolsMapped() {

 Get-VMToolsMapped -VM MYVMNAME

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VMToolsMapped MYVMNAME

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VM | Get-VMToolsMapped

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-Cluster "CLUSTERNAME" | Get-VM | Get-VMToolsMapped

.LINK
http://www.shogan.co.uk

.NOTES
Created by: Sean Duffy
Date: 05/02/2014
#>

[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Specify the VM name you would like to query VMware Tools info for.",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[String]
$VM
)

process {

$Report = @()
New-VIProperty -Name ToolsVersion -ObjectType VirtualMachine -ValueFromExtensionProperty 'config.tools.ToolsVersion' -Force

$VMInfo = Get-VM $VM | Select Name, ToolsVersion
Switch ($VMInfo.ToolsVersion) {
	9344 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.5"}
	9226 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.1u2"}
	9221 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.1u1"}
	9217 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.1"}
	9216 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.1"}
	8396 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.0u3"}
	8395 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.0u3"}
	8394 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.0u2"}
	8389 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.0u1"}
	8384 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.0"}
	8307 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1u3"} 
	8306 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1u3"} 
	8305 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1u3"} 
	8300 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1u2"}
	8295 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1u1"}
	8290 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1"}
	8289 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1"}
	8288 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.1"}
	8196 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.0u4 or esx/4.0u3"}
	8195 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.0u2"}
	8194 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.0u1"}
	8193 {$ESXMapping = "esx/4.0"}
	7304 {$ESXMapping = "esx/3.5u5"}
	7303 {$ESXMapping = "esx/3.5u4"}
	7302 {$ESXMapping = "esx/3.5u3"}
	default {$ESXMapping = "Unknown"}
	}

$row = New-Object -Type PSObject -Property @{
   		Name = $VMInfo.Name
		ToolsVersion = $VMInfo.ToolsVersion
		ESXMapping = $ESXMapping
	}
$Report += $row
return $Report

}
}

If you have any issues copying and pasting the script from this post, here is a direct download you can use too:

[download id=”28″]

 

Vote for my PuppetLabs entry

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It’s not often that I push for votes or request votes for anything, but I am keen to win this one!

PuppetLabs are doing a competition where you submit GIF animations depicting an IT “horror story” with humor. My entry is below and I would love if you could check it out and hit the Vote button just below my entry GIF on the link to follow…

http://puppetlabs.com/meme/it-team-deploying-untested-patch-critical-system-friday-afternoon