I have after reading a tweet written the simplest script for a SAN exchange, my script just look for the VMs associated with one datastore and storage vmotion them to an new datastore with no downtime 🙂 of course this requires Enterprise or higher in your vSphere licensing.

I have done some assumptions that there is equally many datastores provisioned in the new as the old and that no VMs have RDMs and vmdk on several datastores.

The Get-Datastore cmdlet can filter using wildcards like *c2* if your naming convension is complex and you need to find your old/new datastores objects.

For each old datastore i wait 30 minutes before starting on the next, maybe this must be set a bit higher depending on how long the storage vmotion takes and how large the datastores/vmdk´s are. Maybe we should put a sleep after starting move of each VM?! I have not yet had the pleasure testing in a large environment yet..

# Move VMs to new datastore using SVMotion
#
# Niklas Akerlund /RTS
#

# I want all old and new datastores as objects in arrays
$OldDatastores = Get-Datastore vmfs-volumes-old0*
$NewDatastores = Get-Datastore vmfs-volumes-new0*
$i = 0

# Get all VMs in each old datastore and move them
Foreach ($OldDatastore in $OldDatastores){
	$VMs = Get-VM -Datastore $OldDatastore
	
	Foreach ($VM in $VMs)
	{
		# Move the VM to a new datastore
		$VM | Move-VM -Datastore $NewDatastores[$i] -RunAsync
		
	}
	
	$i++
	# we want to give the SVMotions a little time before taking the next datastore 
	Start-Sleep 1800
}

I would recommend testing on a single datastore or a few VMs and when feeling comfortable running on all datastores..

I got a question what network card some VMs had in a datacenter, as a best practice you should use VMXNET 3 where it is possible because it gives the best performance.

So i wrote this very simple script in a few lines that do a csv export of all VMs and what kind of NIC they have, of course one could extend it with OS and stuff but that will have to be next time cause my schedule is kind of tight.

When you use the wizard to set up a Windows 2008 R2 the vSphere set an E1000 NIC by default and that is not what we want, so set up a correct template or remove this nic and add a new when installing single machines!

# Get the Virtual Network Adapter
#
# Niklas Åkerlund / RTS
$VMs = Get-VM *
$Data = @()
foreach ($VM in $VMs){
$NICs = $VM.NetworkAdapters
foreach ($NIC in $NICs) {
$into = New-Object PSObject
Add-Member -InputObject $into -MemberType NoteProperty -Name VMname $VM.Name
Add-Member -InputObject $into -MemberType NoteProperty -Name NICtype $NIC.Type
$Data += $into
}
}
$Data | Export-Csv -Path e:\temp\admna\NICs.csv -NoTypeInformation

I want to share my latest automation scripting, i am in a project where we are in-sourcing from a hosting company. We have connected the hosts to the outsourcers NFS share, of course with powerCLI, when doing it this way i get the datastores on all servers in our cluster, without the risk of differences between the hosts datastores.

# Create NFS shares on all hosts
#
# Niklas Åkerlund /RTS
$NFSdatas = Import-Csv -Path "nfsdatastores.csv" -Delimiter ";"
$VIHosts = get-cluster -Name Cluster1 | get-vmhost | where {$_.ConnectionState -eq "Connected"}
foreach ($VIHost in $VIHosts){
foreach ($NFSdata in $NFSdatas){
$NFSHost = $NFSdata.Host
$NFSshare = $NFSdata.Share
$NFSShareName = $NFSdata.ShareName
if (($VIHost | Get-Datastore | where {$_.Name -eq $NFSShareName -and $_.type -eq "NFS"}-ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null){
Write-Host "Monterar NFSstore $($NFSShareName) på $($VIHost)"
New-Datastore -Nfs -VMHost $VIHost -Name $NFSShareName -Path $NFSshare -NfsHost $NFSHost
}
}
}

Now when we have this in place, during the transitions the hosting company shut down the VMs on their hosts that we are going to take over.  And we add the VM to the inventory on our vCenter, when doing this the vmdk got a different datastore id in the config, also some settings should be updated to the corporate standard for the virtualization platform at the customer.

# Script to update VM with vmdk and right settings
#
# Argument in is VM name
# Niklas Akerlund / RTS AB 2011

$VMname = $args[0]
if ($VMname -ne $null){
$VM = Get-VM $VMname
$Datastore = Get-Datastore -VM $VM
$HDDs = Get-Harddisk -VM $VM

# Remove incorrect hdd referenes

Remove-HardDisk -HardDisk $HDDs -Confirm:$false

foreach ($HDD in $HDDs){
$HDDname = $HDD.Filename
$HDDsNames = $HDDname.Split("/")
$count = $HDDsNames.count
$VMdkName = $HDDsNames[$count-1]
#Write-Host $VMdkName
$diskpath = "[" + $Datastore.Name + "] " + $VM.Name + "/" + $VMdkName

#Write-Host $diskpath

New-HardDisk -VM $VM -DiskPath $diskpath
}

# Reconfigure VM Settings

$spec = new-object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$spec.MemoryAllocation = New-Object VMware.Vim.ResourceAllocationInfo
$spec.MemoryAllocation.Limit = -1
$spec.CpuAllocation = New-Object VMware.Vim.ResourceAllocationInfo
$spec.CpuAllocation.Limit = -1
$spec.tools = New-Object VMware.Vim.ToolsConfigInfo
$spec.tools.toolsUpgradePolicy = "manual"
$spec.swapPlacement = "inherit"

$VM = $VM | get-view
$VM.ReconfigVM_Task($spec)
}

After this we start up the VM and later we do a storage vMotion of the VM to the customers FC-SAN

Get-VM theVM | Move-VM -Datastore fcdatastore1

I have had the opportunity to do some PowerCLI scripting on an installation where we have  vDS (virtual Distributed Switch). In the PowerCLI there is not so much cmdlets for the distributed switches, that is kind of awkward as there is so many cmdlets for everything else.. Luckily LucD had made some nice functions for me to use when creating the port groups.

I used his function for creating port groups, as the customer had about 20 vlans that needed to be added it was a perfect match to do it by powerCLI because setting up this manually is boring! So i had a csv file with the name and vlan id which i ran through in a foreach loop, then all was done.

# Create Distributed virtual portgroups for each VLAN
# Niklas Åkerlund / RTS AB 2011-09-09
#

$Datacenter = "datacenter"
$vDSName = "dvswitch01"
$vDSPortGroupPorts = 128

# Call Functions from motherscript
. .\Set-vDS-Porgroup-functions2.ps1

$vDS = Get-dvSwitch -DataCenterName $Datacenter -dvSwitchName $vDSName
#Write-Host $vDS
$vlans = Import-Csv vlan.csv -Delimiter ";"

foreach ($vlan in $vlans){
$name = $vlan.Name
$vlanid = $vlan.VLAN
if ($name -ne ""){
Write-Host $name
New-dvSwPortgroup $vDS $name -PgNumberPorts $vDSPortGroupPorts -PgVlanType "VLAN" -PgVlanId $vlanid
}
}

But then we realized that we needed to change some settings with both the security and load balancing so i had to remove all my port groups and start over.. I did not want to remove them manually and the powerCLI cmdlet that removes standard port groups could not be used on a vDS, I did not find the code from LucD in his blog to remove a vDS port group so i came up with the brilliant idea to use Onyx, it is a tool from VMware Labs that interprets the traffic between the vSphere Client and the vCenter and transform it to powerCLI code or .Net or SOAP or Javascript.

I then after starting this tool connected to my vCenter and through the vSphere Client removed a vDS port group, i got the powerCLI code (which I probably could have found out being a bit smarter in powershell/powerCLI without Onyx, but now I´m not :-P) So i did a small script to find all my vDS port groups and remove them.. Note that i cannot remove a vDS port group that already has been populated with connected VM´s.

# Remove vds port groups
#
# Niklas Åkerlund / Real Time Services AB

$vlans = Import-Csv vlan.csv -Delimiter ";"

$PGs = Get-VirtualPortGroup

foreach ($vlan in $vlans){
foreach ($PG in $PGs){
if ($vlan.Name -eq $PG.Name){
$destroy = $PG.Id
#Write-Host $destroy
$pek = Get-View -Id $destroy
$pek.Destroy_Task()
}
}
}

And now i could run the add script again with the added parameters for more security and load balancing.

New-dvSwPortgroup $vDS $name -PgNumberPorts $vDSPortGroupPorts<code>
-PgVlanType "VLAN" -PgVlanId $vlanid -SecPolMacChanges:$false</code>
-SecPolForgedTransmits:$false -TeamingPolicy "loadbalance_loadbased"