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

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″]

 

A function to lookup Host System friendly name by MoRef using PowerCLI

In a recent blog post, I showed a simple method of outputting a list of hosts with their friendly names, as well as their MoRef (Managed Object Reference) names alongside eachother, enabling you to match up which host belongs to which MoRef. I wanted to take that a little further, with a function that is able to return the friendly name of a host’s MoRef that is input into the function. I have used this is a larger reporting script, where I can only get the MoRef of a host via it’s property within a cluster object. Basically, I look for any Failover hosts (admission control policy), which is an array, and the hosts are listed as indexed objects of this array. They are also only displayed as MoRef names, so at this point, instead of inserting the MoRef into my results, I insert the MoRef into this function, return the friendly name, and input this instead. Which allows the person reading the report to easily identify the host! $cluster.ExtensionData.Configuration.DasConfig.AdmissionControlPolicy.FailoverHosts <- In this example, $cluster is a particular cluster using the “specify a failover host” policy, and “FailoverHosts” is the array, with each object within containing a host MoRef. For example FailoverHosts[0].Value would be one instance, and may equate to “HostSystem-host-28” for example.   So here is the function. It takes two mandatory parameters: -MoRef (the MoRef of the host in question of course), and -Cluster (the name of the Cluster to do the lookup in) – the function loops through each host in this cluster to look for a host that matches the input MoRef.

Function Get-VMHostByMoRef() {

<#
.SYNOPSIS
Fetches host name by input MoRef and Cluster to look in

.DESCRIPTION
Fetches host name by input MoRef and Cluster to look in

.PARAMETER MoRef
The MoRef of the host system

.PARAMETER Cluster
The name of the cluster to do the lookup in

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VMHostByMoRef -MoRef HostSystem-host-28 -Cluster MyCluster01

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

.NOTES
Created by: Sean Duffy
Date: 22/02/2013
#>

[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Specify the Host MoRef name you would like to query for it's friendly name.",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)][String]$MoRef,[Parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Specify the Cluster to search hosts in.",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)][String]$Cluster
)

process {

$AllHosts = Get-Cluster $Cluster | Get-VMHost
$thehost = $AllHosts | Where {$_.ExtensionData.MoRef -match $MoRef} | Select-Object -Property Name

return $thehost

}
}

Here is a quick sample of the output when called directly from the PowerCLI prompt (note the MoRef of “host-22” used to find the real host name of “esxi02.homelab.local”: Hopefully this may be of use to some – add it to your PowerCLI script/function toolkit or throw it into your PowerShell $profile for easy access in the future!

Get Virtual Machine Inventory from a Hyper-V Failover Cluster using PowerShell

A colleague was asking around for a PowerShell script that would fetch some inventory data for VMs on a Hyper-V cluster the other day. Not knowing too much about Hyper-V and having only ever briefly looked at what was out there in terms of PowerShell cmdlets for managing Hyper-V, I decided to dive in tonight after I got home.

 

Here is a function that will fetch Inventory data for all VMs in a specified Failover Cluster. This is what it fetches:

  • VM Name
  • VM CPU Count
  • VM CPU Socket Count
  • VM Memory configuration
  • VM State (Up or Down)
  • Cluster Name the VM resides on
  • Hyper-V Host name the VM resides on
  • Network Virtual Switch Name
  • NIC Mac Address
  • Total VHD file size in MB
  • Total VHD Count

 

Being a function, you can pipe in the name of the cluster you want, for example Get-Cluster | Get-HyperVInventory. Or you could do Get-HyperVInventory -ClusterName “ExampleClusterName”. You could also send it to an HTML Report by piping it to “ConvertTo-HTML | Out-File example.html”

Download here, or copy it out from the script block below:
[download id=”15″]
 

# Requires: Imported HyperV PowerShell module (http://pshyperv.codeplex.com/releases/view/62842)
# Requires: Import-Module FailoverClusters
# Requires: Running PowerShell as Administrator in order to properly import the above modules

function Get-HyperVInventory {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
Fetches Hyper-V VM Inventory from a specified Hyper-V Failover cluster

.DESCRIPTION
Fetches Hyper-V VM Inventory from a specified Hyper-V Failover cluster

.PARAMETER ClusterName
The Name of the Hyper-V Failover Cluster to inspect

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-HyperVInventory -ClusterName "dev-cluster1"

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-Cluster | Get-HyperVInventory

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

.NOTES
Created by: Sean Duffy
Date: 09/07/2012
#>

[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Name of the Cluster to fetch inventory from",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[System.String]
$ClusterName
)

process {

$Report = @()

$Cluster = Get-Cluster -Name $ClusterName
$HVHosts = $Cluster | Get-ClusterNode

foreach ($HVHost in $HVHosts) {
$VMs = Get-VM -Server $HVHost
foreach ($VM in $VMs) {
[long]$TotalVHDSize = 0
$VHDCount = 0
$VMName = $VM.VMElementName
$VMMemory = $VM | Get-VMMemory
$CPUCount = $VM | Get-VMCPUCount
$NetSwitch = $VM | Get-VMNIC
$NetMacAdd = $VM | Get-VMNIC
# VM Disk Info
$VHDDisks = $VM | Get-VMDisk | Where { $_.DiskName -like "Hard Disk Image" }
foreach ($disk in $VHDDisks) {
$VHDInfo = Get-VHDInfo -VHDPaths $disk.DiskImage
$TotalVHDSize = $TotalVHDSize + $VHDInfo.FileSize
$VHDCount += 1
}
$TotalVHDSize = $TotalVHDSize/1024/1024
$row = New-Object -Type PSObject -Property @{
Cluster = $Cluster.Name
VMName = $VMName
VMMemory = $VMMemory.VirtualQuantity
CPUCount = $CPUCount.VirtualQuantity
CPUSocketCount = $CPUCount.SocketCount
NetSwitch = $NetSwitch.SwitchName
NetMACAdd = $NetMacAdd.Address
HostName = $HVHost.Name
VMState = $HVHost.State
TotalVMDiskSizeMB = $TotalVHDSize
TotalVMDiskCount = $VHDCount
} ## end New-Object
$Report += $row
}
}
return $Report

}
}

 

Example use cases – load the function into your PowerShell session, or place it in your $profile for easy access in future, and run the following:

# Example 1
Get-HyperVInventory -ClusterName "mycluster1"
# Example 2
Get-Cluster | Get-HyperVInventory
# Example 3
Get-HyperVInventory -ClusterName "mycluster1" | ConvertTo-HTML | Out-File C:\Report.html

 

The function includes help text and examples, so you can also issue the normal “Get-Help Get-HyperVInventory” or “Get-Help Get-HyperVInventory -Examples”. It is by no means perfect and could do with some improvements, for example if there is more than one Virtual Switch Network associated with a VM these would be listed in a row multiple times for each. Feel free to suggest any improvements or changes in the comments.

 

Figuring out what build of ESX or ESXi VMware Tools maps to for VMs using PowerCLI

 

This evening I was spending a bit of extra time checking through various components of a vSphere 4 installation to see what was compatible with ESXi 5 and what was not. As you would expect VMware Tools and Hardware needs to be checked for Virtual Machine compatibility with ESXi 5. There are plenty of scripts in PowerCLI out there that will show you how to determine the VMware Tools version, but this is always reported back as a four digit “cryptic” number, which doesn’t make much sense unless you go look it up.

 

In my quest to make this easier, I wrote a quick PowerCLI Function that will report back with some (hopefully) helpful information – it lists the Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine Tools version number as well as what version of ESX or ESXi + the update level that version of VMware Tools maps to. In my quest to make this easier for myself, I stumbled across this VMware Version mapping-file. Within it, contained the answers to the various VMware Tools version “codes” that were easy enough to retrieve with PowerCLI. My function simply does a quick check to see if the Tools number on a VM matches any of these codes and then lists the mapped version of ESX(i) corresponding to the code next to the VM.

 

So without going on in any further detail, here is an example of the output from a cluster I ran my function on (interesting I spot an ESX 3.5 VMware Tools VM in there!):

 

 

I think this will be a very useful little Function to have handy for these kinds of checks – especially larger infrastructures where VM tools are not known to be 100% up to date! The great thing about this is you can pipe in VMs. In the example above, I have grabbed all the VMs in a certain cluster and checked those using Get-Cluster and Get-VM, piping the output of those cmdlets to my Get-VMToolsMapped Function. Here is the script download:

 

[download id=”12″]

 

# Mapping file found at: http://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions
# Content of mapping file as of 08/03/2012:

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: 08/03/2012
#>

[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) {
	8389 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.0u1"}
	8384 {$ESXMapping = "esx/5.0"}
	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

}
}

 

PS – big thanks to @alanrenouf and @jonathanmedd for pointing out the much more efficient PowerShell “Switch” statement – I have updated the script above to use this and saved quite a few lines of code in the process.

 

PowerCLI – Fetch Interesting stats or configuration for a list of VMs

Now and then I find that I need to retrieve some useful information from a variety of VMs, this usually involves me doing a Get-VM with some selections and criteria to search for. However sometimes the information I require about a VM is listed in the advanced configuration and not as easy to get to with a single cmdlet. I thought it would be really handy to have a PowerCLI function that would easily pull the useful information out for me and summarise it for any given VM or set of VMs.

 

With that said, I recently read a great blog post by Jonathan Medd (Basic VMware Cluster Compatibility Check), and after reading it I thought it would be a great idea to create a set of functions that provide me with the information I often use. To start, I thought I would do a function that lists the most useful or common information about VMs that I often search for. As well as speeding up the process of retrieving information about VMs, I thought it would also be good PS/PowerCLI practise for me to write more functions. The reason being that I often tend to do PowerCLI reporting scripts rather than actual functions that accept input from the pipeline or other parameters. Below is my function to collect some useful information about Virtual Machines – you can specify a VM with the -VM parameter or pipe a list of VMs to it, using Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats. Jonathan’s post also had an interesting section about the order in which output is displayed. You’ll need to pipe the output to Select-Object to change the order the information is fed back in, otherwise it will list the information in the default order. This is not really a problem anyway, just good to know if you are fussy about the order in which the output comes back in!)

 

So, here is the first function (Get-VMUsefulStats):

 

[download id=”7″]

 

function Get-VMUsefulStats {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
Fetches interesting or useful stats about VMware Virtual Machines

.DESCRIPTION
Fetches interesting or useful stats about VMware Virtual Machines

.PARAMETER VM
The Name of the Virtual Machine to fetch information about

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VMUsefulStats -VM FS01

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

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats | Where {$_.Name -match "FS"}

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

.NOTES
Created by: Sean Duffy
Date: 18/01/2012
#>

[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Name of the VM to fetch stats about",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[System.String]
$VMName
)

process {

$VM = Get-VM $VMName

$VMHardwareVersion = $VM.Version
$VMGuestOS = $VM.OSName
$VMvCPUCount = $VM.NumCpu
$VMMemShare = ($VM.ExtensionData.Config.ExtraConfig | Where {$_.Key -eq "sched.mem.pshare.enable"}).Value
$VMMemoryMB = $VM.MemoryMB
$VMMemReservation = $VM.ExtensionData.ResourceConfig.MemoryAllocation.Reservation
$VMUsedSpace = [Math]::Round($VM.UsedSpaceGB,2)
$VMProvisionedSpace = [Math]::Round($VM.ProvisionedSpaceGB,2)
$VMPowerState = $VM.PowerState

New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
Name = $VMName
HW = $VMHardwareVersion
VMGuestOS = $VMGuestOS
vCPUCount = $VMvCPUCount
MemoryMB = $VMMemoryMB
MemoryReservation = $VMMemReservation
MemSharing = $VMMemShare
UsedSpaceGB = $VMUsedSpace
ProvisionedGB = $VMProvisionedSpace
PowerState = $VMPowerState
}
}
}

 

You can use the cmdlet to very easily retrieve information about a single VM or list of VMs. Examples:

 

Get-VMUsefulStats -VM NOOBS-VC01

Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats

 

To format the output in a neat table, pipe the above to Format-Table (ft) like so:

 

Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats | ft

 

The “MemShare” value is interesting – it is something I was specifically interested in, as some VMs I have worked with in the past have needed memory sharing to be specifically disabled, and this is something that needs to be changed with an advanced parameter on the VM. Therefore most (default) VMs will not have this entry at all and will appear blank in the output. (the parameter I am referring to for those interested is sched.mem.pshare.enable). Of course this most likely won’t be of any use to you, so feel free to omit this bit from the function, or feel free to customise the function to return information useful to your VMware deployment VMs. Here is an example of the output for one VM.

 

 

Anyway, I hope someone finds this useful, and please do let me know if you think of any improvements or better way of achieving a certain result.