This week I did some finishing touches to the last chapter of my new book, on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager. The book is in 1st draft form, and is currently being proof-read to remove my usual spelling and gramatical errors, before being made available to some helpful folks at VMware for some technical feedback.

Anyway, my last chapter discuss how to do manual failover without VMware Site Recovery Manager – For fun I thought it might be nice to see how VMware’s PowerShell, currently in beta could be used to script this process. The idea of this chapter in the book is to do two things – to show how awful life is without SRM, and also to give me people an idea of how they could have a Plan B, in case Plan A didn’t work out for them.

Currently, PowerShell is hot topic – and didn’t want to sit on this stuff until the time book came out. My work was assisted by Carter Shanklin of VMware, who was happy to answer my direct emails. Carter is the Product Manager for the VMware PowerShell Toolkit. Additionally, I would like to thank Hal Rottenberg who I first met via the VMware Community Forums. Hal is the author of a new book called “Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell”. If you wish to learn more about the power of PowerShell then I would certainly recommend watching and joining the VMware VMTN community forum – and purchasing Hal’s book. Lastly, I would like thank Luc Dekens from the PowerShell forum who was especially helpful in explaining how to create a virtual switches with PowerShell.

I could cut and paste just the PowerShell bit here – but there are screen grabs – and that’s a PITA on web-pages. So here’s the 1st draft of that last chapter in a PDF format. The MOST interesting parts are the PowerShell pieces that allow you to do bulk administration tasks – neccessary in handling many virtual machines and ESX hosts it includes:

* Getting up and Started with Microsoft Community Technical Preview of PowerShell 2.0 with the VMware Community Extensions
* Rescan all the HBA on every ESX hosts in VirtualCenter
* Renaming VMFS volumes
* Creating a internal vSwitch on all ESX hosts with .PS1 file – prior to a test failover
* Searching a VMFS volume, and registering VMs to the right folder & resource pool
* Fixing the Networking of many VMs so that the point to the right port-group

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under SRM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.