Performance Reporting

Not too long ago, I wrote a script for Script-O-Mania, the idea of the script was to gather CPU Ready times from VMs across one or more ESX hosts and display their values on a nice graph. I felt like this would be a useful tool because the only way to see the CPU Ready Time information in vCenter is on a VM by VM basis, there is no way to select a single host and see the CPU Ready Time for several VMs on a single graph. Since that particular counter can be useful in identifying sluggish VMs, I felt like it would be really useful to be able to see several VMs together as well as to compare VMs on one ESX host to another. The original script can be found on the Script-O-Mania contest page.

After writing that script, I thought it could be even more useful if it could be used for other performance counters besides just CPU Ready and also if instead of grouping the VMs just by the ESX host, if I could group them by any object that is visible in vCenter such as a cluster, folder, resource pool etc. In vCenter the graphs you see for these objects contain specific counters pertinent to those objects, the performance tab does not allow you to graph VMs that contained in the specified group object.

I used PrimalForms 2009 to make it more user friendly with a GUI front end. To use this little app, please make sure you have the following prerequisites installed.

Prerequisites:
- Powershell 2.0
- PowerCli
- Microsoft Excel 2007
- The underlying Powershell script is not signed, so set your Powershell settings accordingly

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions.

Download here

VMware Converter - Error: Unable to obtain hardware information

While trying to use VMware Converter stand-alone version 4.01 to convert a Windows 2008 R2 vm, I kept getting the error "Unable to obtain hardware information". I found this post which mentioned faking out the system by changing the source VM OS, so I gave that a try and changed my source VM from Windows 2008 R2 to Windows Vista, then tried to convert and low and behold, it worked like a charm!

Use VMware Converter to Import Windows XP VM

If you ever use VMware Converter to import a Windows XP machine from for example a VMware workstation image, you may find that when you boot it up, it sits there at a black screen with a cursor in the top left hand part of the screen. Left alone, the VM will start to use 100% CPU.

I ran into this issue yesterday and discovered that the problem was due to the original Windows XP machine having IDE disks. When importing a VM like this from VMware Workstation, change the disks to SCSI when you setup the converter job.

vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide

Just received the latest book I ordered, vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide. I was a little surprised when I received the package, I wasn't expecting such a small compact book ... but, good things come in small packages! I can tell just by thumbing through this book that it is packed full of juicy tidbits, can't wait to dive in!

Powershell - Get Snapshots for all VMs in a Resource Pool

Recently needed to find all the snapshots in a resource pool, so to do that, I needed to first get all the VMs in the resource pool like this:

Get-VM -Location (Get-ResourcePool mypoolname)

And get the snapshots, so pipe the output and voila:

$snaplist = Get-VM -Location (Get-ResourcePool mypoolname) | Get-Snapshot

Nice and easy!

Script-O-Mania Entry

Just submitted my script to the Script-O-Mania contest put on by VMware. Here are some screenshots. Script will be posted after the contest ends.

The script gathers CPU Ready Time data for VMs and graphs them one a per-host basis and creates a chart and data tab for each host. This can help you identify hosts that are possibly over-saturated or running too many SMP VMs.