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Bad news is that as of the 2011-12-31 I finished working for my Employer in order to move back to my home country, so I no longer have direct access to (and responsibility for) VMWare (and all the other really cool stuff we had, infini-band, HPC etc.) To top it off I was told before I left they intended to implement vblock (I suspect they just wanted to make me jealous ;) )

Good news is that from the 2012-01-09 I am starting my new job which will be mainly SCCM to start but moving into Citrix as well. So you will likely see no more VMWare posts, however I intend to make it up to you all by posting lots more

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One of my users was complaining of “slow vm performance over the network”, so I requested a few simple diags including a traceroute from his machine to the vm instead I got a traceroute from the VM to the VM. So I decided that clearly I was asking too much from the user and threw the following batch file together (I may rewrite it in powershell for fun later).

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This is a function that allows you to clone a VM from a specified snapshot. The only way to do this in the UI would be to take a snapshot of the current state, revert to the one you wish to clone, clone, revert to latest snapshot and then delete latest snapshot. As you can see that is time consuming and takes numerous mouse clicks.

I recommend adding this function to your powershell profile so you always have access to it.

As always feel free to comment.

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After a mass of updates to the code a new version is out, this is still experimental so should only be used in a lab environment.

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This little gem I wrote will listen to all interfaces on a computer for CDP packets. Once it has looped all the interfaces any packets it has captured are processed and added to WMI.

Using the attached SMS_DEF.mof we can extract that information and place it in SCCM. Anyone who knows what CDP is will see the benefit immediately. For the rest; CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol), Cisco devices send out CDP packets every 60seconds each packet contains information about the port it was sent from and the sender. In a nutshell if my computer receives a packet then I can tell which switch I am connected to, what port on that switch and a few other bits and bobs about the switch. e.g. In a test environment I have a Cisco switch which connects to a Cisco IP phone which then connects to my computer, when exe runs I get two entries in WMI, one for the phone and one for the Switch.

The use case is that helpdesk  may not know where a user is physically or where they are connected to the network and the user may be experiencing network issues, this would allow a helpdesk tech to locate the switchport  the user is connected to and pass that info to the network team for troubleshooting saving both parties the hassle of tracing cables and also allowing reporting on where a user is plugging in over a period of time.

There is still a bit to be done for this but it does generally work.

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Managed to get a few more tweaks / scripts into the pack today. You can grab the powerpack from here:

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I have tweaked my powershell script for the SCCM Dell/HP tags due to popular demand so that it can be run on a single machine using a list of service tags as the source and then will output to a CSV file. The source CSV can have any number of columns however it MUST have the following three for the script to work “Name,Vendor,Tag” in its default state. You also need to edit the $infile & $outfile variables as required.

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Deprecated - VMWare have release an official checker and there is a better script at http://virtu-al.net

This is a script I wrote to check vSphere 5 vRAM compliance.

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Sorry to all those that have tried to contact me via the contact form, for some reason hotmail has been blocking emails from anyone not in my address book for what seems to be some time. I have no idea why or when they started this. I have changed the destination address for the contact form to another of my email accounts, so hopefully this has solved the problem. If you tried to contact me in the past and I have not replied it is most likely due to this. Please try again and I will respond, if you do not get a reponse please add a comment to this post so I know you have tried to contact me.

Regards,

Ryan

A while back I had a support case open with MS about some scripting in winPE. In order to debug the problem we wanted to see what variables were declared & what their values were. The support tech came up with the attachted script, I never got round to adding it to my scripts folder, so I ran it by opening a command shell in winPE (F8) then “net use Z: \\<mycomputer>\c$\users\<username>\desktop\”. Then I ran the script with “cscript.exe SCCMVarDump.vbs” a file is created in the same location as the script.

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