During the last month whilst some colleagues have been away on their holidays, I’ve been spending a lot more time with our Virtual Infrastructure than normal and I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve picked up along the way. They are probably no brainers for your hardcore VMware administrators, but for those like me who aren’t 100% dedicated to one specific area, and particularly have been long time Windows admins, there’s nothing like getting really involved with something for a few weeks to really get to grips with how this stuff works.
Everybody in the PowerShell knows MoW aka the PowerShell Guy, aka Marc Van Orsouw. Either you have used one of his tools like Powertab or WMI Explorer, he’s answered one of your forum postings or you’ve read one of his blog posts to find some information about PowerShell or solve a problem. He is also crazy fun to be around, he had me in tears of laughter back at the PowerShell community dinner in Barcelona last year mainly because he instigated this which happened at the next morning’s PowerShell session with Jeffrey Snover.
One of the most interesting aspects and main reasons I started the podcasting was the opportunity to meet and speak with interesting people. Within the PowerShell community there are lots of people highly enthusiastic about this particular area of technology.
Recently Alan Renouf and I were able to talk with Shay Levy (unfortunately we couldn’t meet him since we live in different countries) who is one of the most active members of the PowerShell community.
So I got asked to write an article for the http://www.simple-talk.com/ website, a well known online technical journal and community hub around SQL and .NET technologies. They’ve recently been branching out into Exchange as well hence they reason they were looking for some Exchange based articles.
The article I have written for them is based around a presentation I have made around some user groups a few times now, i.e. using PowerShell and WMI to manage Exchange 2003.
Back in January I posted about how to find free space in Exchange 2003 databases using Powershell. Not long after this we changed our online maintenance schedules resulting in each database not having maintenance every day. The original script was based on the assumption of maintenance happening every day and there being events in the application log for every database in the last 24 hours.
Consequently I have had to adjust the script so that it would look back a few days to ensure there are logs for each database.
So May looks like a great month for some of the user groups I regularly attend.
First up we have the VMware user group in London on Thursday May 14th. This is an excellent event for VMware administrators to attend and has a great mix of vendor and community contributions. In particular this time check out Alan Renouf’s pre-show PowerShell workshop. This is before the usual start time and should be great if you are new to PowerShell or already using the VI Toolkit.
Having had some fun previously putting together some PowerPacks for PowerGUI, I had an idea that it would be quite a good tool to use with Twitter. One thing I found annoying with the web interface for Twitter was that it was difficult to see a full list for who you were following and who was following you - you could only see 20 people per page. After Steve Murawski put together his list of Powershell Twitterers at the Mind of Root website I started playing around with some of the ways you could use Powershell to access Twitter data.
On the Get-Scripting Podcast we recently caught up with Scott Herold from Quest / Vizioncore whom Alan had attempted to record an interview with at the recent VMWorld conference, but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on which way you look at it) they ran out of time because Scott spent so much time demoing his new project the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative since it was proving incredibly popular.
So when they both got home we hooked up over Skype and had a lot of fun recording the interview that way instead.
A lot of the scripting I have done with PowerShell has been around manging Active Directory and up till now the majority of that work has been with the Quest AD cmdlets which are brilliant for this job. Of course not everyone is always able to install third-party cmdlets into their environment and for other reasons I have been as keen as anyone to see native cmdlets released for AD.
Recently I needed to check some registry key values on a bunch of servers. There were far too many servers to make this a manual task and in addition if they weren’t what I was expecting then I needed to change them.
Shay Levy has very helpfully published a Stand Alone Registry Functions Library which I made use of. It allows you to query and set registry values for things such as DWords, Strings, Binary Values on remote machines very easily.