18 June 2011 ~ 2 Comments

VMware Infrastructure Toolkit – PowerShell Scripting

 

PowerGUI

Microsoft PowerShell

PowerGUI scripting is a must know for supporting VMware.

 

 

 

 

After spending days evaluating products that would report virtual infrastructure capacity to my liking and that were affordable, I opted to write my own reporting and capacity planning application using PowerShell scripts and Excel.

 

Using PowerGUI and VI Toolkit for PowerShell I created two scripts: one script queries the Virtual Center for data storage capacity and utilization. The second script queries for VM to host capacity and memory – CPU metrics. The information is saved to a .CSV files once a week.

 

Using Excel, I import the .CSV files into my VM Dashboard (Excel) and run calculation for each VM environment (DEV, QA, Prod). To enhance the look of the dashboard, I have thrown in graphs to show resource utilization and a trending graph.

 

The VM dashboard has been well received by managers and those who want to follow week by week changes and usage of the virtual infrastructure. It also helps to proactively grow the VI because we can see weekly growth of each environment and know in advance to add more storage or other server resources.

To get started writing PowerShell scripts or to borrow scripts already written visit the VMware VMTN blog for PowerShell.

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2 Responses to “VMware Infrastructure Toolkit – PowerShell Scripting”

  1. ron 20 April 2009 at 2:27 am Permalink

    Is is possible to download this vm dashboard?

    Tx

    Ron

  2. editor 28 March 2010 at 8:23 am Permalink

    Hi Ron, the dashboard was scrapped. Veeam has a free tool that does a better job. Try their monitor tool at http://www.veeam.com/esxi-monitoring-free.html

    JS


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