Following on from the blog post Testing TCP Port Response from PowerShell which provided a means to check that servers had fully rebooted after a patching and reboot cycle, I needed to take this one step further and check that all of the Windows Services set to Automatic successfully started after the reboot.
This should be pretty straightforward since we have a Get-Service cmdlet. Unfortunately however, this cmdlet does not return a StartMode parameter, i.
Right, let’s set this one out. I do not, have not ever, nor probably will ever will like any AV Enterprise Management Products. However, sometimes you have to work with them and frequently the data in the Management Product does not actually reflect the end user / server estate. The below function will query the registry of a remote machine(s) and report back the state of the installed Symantec SEP client to help perform a true up.
The HP Enterprise Virtual Array Family with VMware vSphere 4.0 , 4.1 AND 5.0 Configuration Best Practises Guide, available here, contains many recommendations for ESXi configuration. There are a number of recommended settings in this document to enhance the storage performance, a subset of which I have picked as appropriate for the environment and then needed to configure them on all ESXi hosts.
They can be implemented via PowerCLI and the below script demonstrates how these different types of settings can be configured.
Recently I was listening to the PowerScripting Podcast and Hal mentioned a Test-TCPPort function he had put together a while back. I had a similar need to be able to test a bunch of machines post reboot, that they had come back successfully and a Ping test wouldn’t do since that didn’t necessarily mean that Windows has successfully booted :-)
So taking inspiration from that post I put together the following script (I convert it to a function for my own use, but it’s easier for my colleagues to use as a script) which will test by default RDP response from servers and report the results.
The UK PowerShell User Group for December 2011 will take place at 19.30 GMT on Thursday December 15t. The topic is ‘Use the WSMAN cmdlets to retreive WMI information and see a demo of the new WMI API’s CIM cmdlets in PowerShell v3 CTP 2’. I’m looking forward to seeing the new CIM cmdlets from V3 CTP2 since I haven’t had chance to play with those yet. Details from Richard Siddaway’s blog are below:
I recently had a requirement to audit the Share and NTFS permissions of a Windows File Server. PowerShell contains the Get-ACL cmdlet which makes retreving the NTFS permissions fairly straightforward, but for the Share permissions it is not so easy, but we can make use of WMI and the Win32_LogicalShareSecuritySetting class.
The below forum post details some discussion around using this class to find the Share permissions and unsurprisingly the legendary Shay Levy provides the solution.
The second Community Technology Preview of PowerShell V3 is now available. This pre-beta release gives of a flavour of areas of change which may appear in the final release. A CTP has an emphasis on Community , i.e. the PowerShell team is looking for plenty of feedback for this release while they still have time to change things. Below are items logged on Connect by the community which have been fixed since the release of CTP1 - so if you find an issue in your testing, please log it on Connect so it can be reviewed and potentially resolved.
As promised, here are my slides from this evening’s UK PowerShell UserGroup - What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0.
What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0
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I recently had a task to query NIC information on a number of HP Proliant servers, this included the connected NIC speed, duplex settings and status of the configured HP Team. I initally looked at the WMI class Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration which contains a lot of info around NIC configuration. Unfortunately, it does not include NIC speed or duplex settings.
Looking for alternatives, I discovered a script from Hugo Peeters which instead queried the registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} which looked like it would do the job.
A quick post to let you know that I shall be presenting for an online meeting of the UK PowerShell User Group on the topic of ‘What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0’ at 21.00 GMT on Tuesday November 22nd.
Details on how to join in are available from Richard Siddaway’s website.
Hope you can join us.