As you can see you get massive disk savings with our technology. For example if allocated VM disk space equated to 100Gb then Veeam Backup could potentially only need about 17GB. A saving of 83% on allocated disk space.
I don’t want to give the game away too much so if you want to read on download the whitepaper from here > http://www.veeam.com/whitepapers.html

The reply from a VMware employee was:

And I was amazed:

Proof I’m old skool.

So I’d like to thank anyone who nominated for me and make a pledge to keep up the value I provide with this blog site. The features I have planned for the near future are as follows:

• New look for the website to celebrate my vExpert award.
• PowerCLI lessons will continue.
• I have a new version of Vdisk Waste Finder planned but it’s going to take some time to develop

 Once again thank you if you nominated me

http://read.virtualizeplanet.com/?p=8

Ok I have an update on this idea which is going to make this process even simpler. The team that developed Gparted have informed me that in later versions they will inlcude an “align to Mib” feature in the GUI so you don’t have to touch command-line at all.

I’ve been invited to help test and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Asked for help on this one from Luc Dekens – http://www.lucd.info as control of DPM wasn’t so obvious and Luc pointed me to this:

I looked at it and thought uh! But then a few memories started to trigger in my brain. Having previously programmed the SDK in C# I recognized that this was calling the SDK direct some way.  So let’s break it down line by line an try and find out what’s going on:

$cluster = Get-Cluster <clustername> | Get-View

DPM is configured in the settings of a cluster. The line above declares a variable $cluster and then we pass in the results of the Get-Cluster cmdlet which in turn was piped through the Get-View cmdlet.

The Get-Cluster part will return the status of the specified cluster but it’s not enough and this is where piping it into Get-View helps. This will return the fine detail about the cluster including its’ MoRef.

In the script where we see VMware.Vim.~~~ this refers to the use of the VI SDK API.

The next line sets up a custom specification of type: ClusterConfigSpecEx . A custom specification is an object which directs the SDK calls down the right road.

$spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterConfigSpecEx

So now $spec is an object in its own right with properties.

The next thing we have to do is declare to .dpmconfig property of the $spec object as a ClusterDpmConfigInfo property.

$spec.dpmConfig = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterDpmConfigInfo

This will allow us to influence the properties of Clusters DPM properties.

Now we even have properties of $spec.dpmconfig object and in our case it’s the enabled property which is of interest to us:

$spec.dpmConfig.enabled = $true

Changing this from $true to $false is the same as enabling and disabling DPM.

The last line performs the changes.

$taskMoRef = $cluster.ReconfigureComputeResource_Task($spec, $true)

The $taskMoref is a pointer to the Task object which will perform the task based on the criteria. The criteria being  the cluster object . The task is delivered through method execution, in our case ReconfigureComputeResource. This method requires the parameters as specified in the $spec object.

When there isn’t a relevant PowerCLI cmdlet you can fall back on calling the SDK APIs. In this example we are using the ReconfigureComputeResource method that is available on the ComputeResource managed object. One of the parameters for this method are passed through the ClusterConfigSpecEx object.

Now this is a bit much to ingest for a beginner but this is something we are going to have to get used to over time.

My best advice to you is study the following resources:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/GettingStarted201.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0137153635?ie=UTF8&tag=doublecloudor-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0137153635

Now back to the job in hand.

We still need to do a bit more to fully automate this operation.

I needed to execute the scripts I create by scheduling them. After saving my scripts (DPMOFF.ps1 & DPMON.ps1) I used the windows scheduler (boooo, I know) to execute them at given times. To execute them, the scripts have to be passed into the powershell.exe command like so:

powershell.exe c:\dpmon.ps1

But executing the script as shown above isn’t enough. It would fail in its current state. First of all we have to tell powershell to use the VMware API snapin with the following line:

Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core

Next thing we need to do is connect to the relevant vCenter server so you don’t need to be there to manually connect:

Connect-VIServer -server vctest -user administrator -password passwd

Now on the DPMOFF (not DPMON.ps1) script I needed to make sure the hosts where out of stand-by mode:

Start-VMHost esx1.virtualplanet.local -RunAsync -Confirm:$false

Start-VMHost esx2.virtualplanet.local -RunAsync -Confirm:$false

This starts each host, doesn’t prompt you for a “are you sure” question and doesn’t make the script wait until the hosts are powered.

Job done.

So the script looks like this:

That’s it for this lesson.

Previous

vSphere Plugin Wizard allows you to create web plugins and have them registered in the vCenter. To review in more detail have a look at the old post found by clicking >HERE<

In V1.0 if you wanted to remove a plugin you created you had to do it manually. Now in V1.1 you can do it through the wizard. You can only remove plugins created by this app though.

To download this cool app Click > vSphere Plugin Wizard V1.1 (251)

Use this app to plugin you favorite web pages, blogs, admin portals and any other web page you like into vCenter.

Click here to view