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Showing posts from October, 2016

Adding vMotion VMKernel Interfaces En Masse

Here's a quick one-liner that I've been particularly pleased by.  I put this together when I was reconfiguring several c7000 chassis at a time and wanted to minimize the amount of typing that I was doing per host.  This is a big ugly one liner, but what it does is to create a new VMK interface on the specified Port Group, assign it a valid IP Address and enable vMotion for that interface.  The command performs those tasks on all ESXi hosts in the "unconfigured" folder. How does it get the valid IP Address?  Well, it takes the first 2 octets of the host's management IP address, uses a customized 3rd octet, then appends the last octet from the host's management IP address.  So, for example, if the host is managed at 192.168.1.101, the script will use 192.168.#.101 for the vMotion interface. In this example, it uses a port group called "vMotion" on a VDSwitch that ends with Intranet, and has a standard /24 network with 2 in the third octet for vMoti

Speeding Up your PowerCLI Scripts

So, I post a lot of scripts here, and I'm sure that you can see the progress that I've made as I've learnt more and more about PowerCLI, PowerShell and scripting in general.  One of the things that I've recently been considering is how to make my scripts run faster.  I've got some scripts that are designed to make lots of changes, like changing the Port Group assignment of every VM in an environment.  And they take a long time to run.  As in, depending on the size of the environment, several hours.  But, they don't necessarily have to take so long to run... I just wasn't clever enough when I wrote them. There are two major techniques that I'm trying to learn that would seriously speed up those scripts.  The first one is parallel execution of For Each loops... I'm still learning about that one, so will write more about it once I've learnt something worth sharing.  The other though, is much easier, and can generally be worked into any script with