Have you got a nice New-Alias setup you wish were available every time you opened PowerShell? How about a cool function you’ve written that you’d like to not have to import at the start of each session? Well the PowerShell profile is for you! This little text file will allow you to put pretty much any PowerShell command in it and have it run every time you open a new PowerShell window.
At VMworld 2013 vCOps 5.8 was announced. There seem to be some pretty cool features in there. Eric Shanks at The IT Hollow has a great break down on the new features.
By default you can’t really get data out of vCOps but there is a community PowerShell module to allow you to get the stats out. Brian Wuchner over at EnterpriseAdmins.org shows how to use it.
Moving into the world of SCOM, 2012 R2 the venerable SCOM Agent is being renamed Microsoft Monitoring Agent.
For the past few years at VMworld, rockstar PowerShell gurus Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens have given a presentation on PowerCLI. Before I’ve felt that they could go a bit deeper and in this presentation I think they have hit it right on the mark with the depth. Some pretty good tips makes this worth watching.
WARNING: This isn’t an intro to PowerCLI, if you don’t know what an object is or you are just starting out then this might be a bit overwhelming.
Characteristics of vmware’s own infra: 4000 non-production srvrs, 500 production, 290 physical hosts, 4 PB storage….nice #vmworld
— Viktor van den Berg (@viktoriousss) October 17, 2013
Hope it is all virtualised! ;)
Unless it is a major new launch or a brand new product line I tend not to really focus on the spec bump launches from Cisco. However the Cisco Datacenter Blog has an interesting post on the new Nexus 3100 series. The highlight of the post is the platform architecture white paper, those tend to be very useful. The super unfortunate part is that you cannot download it without handing over your details, bummer.
As per my post on the formal announcement of vCAC 6.0, this video shows the process in motion using a beta version. You can view the vCAC integration module on the VMware Solution Exchange. They also have a pretty good Word document available that goes through some of the concepts in the video.
I really think this sort of integration where you can configure the service, ensure the service is as designed and publish the service to end users (vCAC also includes a service provisioning portal, custom forms and all!
Is there a difference between vCPUs and the cores setting in a VM? Yes and no, from vSphere both are just logical data constructs but when looking at the physical side you need to take into account NUMA. The vSphere Blog has all the details and even some light benchmarking.
Marcel Van Den Berg over at UP2V, who works with vSphere and Hyper-V, has a nice breakdown of the differences between vCHS and Azure.
For those that are unaware, VMworld Barcelona is currently going on and with it brings new product updates. In my quest for automation knowledge I’ve become quite interested in vCAC. The unfortunate downside is that (like all “automation” systems, I’m sure) it is quite involved in setting it up. With that in mind I’ve only spent a little bit of time trying to get it going but I’ve learnt one thing, it sure isn’t a next, next, next install!
This is a presentation by Nick Weaver at PuppetConf 2013, although it really doesn’t have to much to do with Puppet I found it to be an interesting talk on the whats and whys of automation.
At the end of the presentation Nick gives his recommendations on how to get started in the field, my 2 cents would be to learn two languages. Learning one is a great start but I think a second will really give you extra flexibility.
I seem to be on a bit of a Puppet kick as of late. Of a night I’ve been watching the many awesome videos of the 2013 PuppetConf and I found this one quite interesting. To me this pattern shows the future of deploying vendor supplied applications and I’m sure all sysadmins will be eternally grateful.
I just wish the presentation had been allowed to finish. :(