Cheng's Random Thoughts on System Management : Powershell

SCVMM 2008 R2 downloadable docs are available now!

Cheng Wei — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Greetings, folks!

I'm pleased to let you all know that our documentation team has just published the doanloadable version of SCVMM 2008 R2 documents at here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=162764

Available documents for download are:

· Deployment Guide

· Guide to Operations Manager Integration

· Security Guide

· Operations Guide

· Scripting Guide

· Cmdlet Reference

· Building PRO-Enabled Management Packs

Go check them out today, download them onto your favorite device, print them out or just read them wherever / however you want.

Feedback on these? Please send it to: scvmfdbk@microsoft.com.

Cheers!

Cheng

All about refreshers ...

Cheng Wei — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:19:00 GMT

If you have been using VMM for a while, you’ve probably figured out that we use various “refreshers” to pull data from the hosts and VMs that we manage. When deploying VMM in various sized environments, depending on the perf/scale requirements, you might need to tweak the refresher schedule to achieve the best performance.

So, to help you understand what’s happening “under the hood”, here are the refreshers we use in SCVMM 2008 product. Please note, that not all refreshers are customizable.

Host Refresher: Runs every 30mins on every host (with time lags) and updates host properties. It also updates disk/SAN and host network (NIC / virtual switch) information. It does not check any VM related properties or perf counters on hosts. Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

VM Refreshers: Two types

VM Heavy Refresher: Runs every 30mins on every Host and also runs whenever a VM is clicked on (or when you call refresh-vm cmdlet). It updates all VM properties, resource pools, clustering information for this VM and snapshots. But it does not update VM performance counter info.

VM Light Refresher: Runs every 2mins on every Host that is currently in the VMM database. This refresher does the following:

- Checks the host state (to see if the agent is running or the agent is down) and virtualization software status

- Syncs the state of a VM

- Marks VMs as missing

- Imports new VMs created outside of VMM (When VMM detects a new VM created on the virtualization platform, we import it into VMM and kick off the heavy refresher for the new VMs)

Cluster Refresher: Runs every 30mins and refreshes all cluster properties (including bringing in newly added nodes or taking our removed nodes). Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

Library Refresher: Runs on user configurable schedule (increment by 1 hour interval and can be turned off completely) and updates the library shares info and library objects. Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

Perf Refresher: Runs every 9 minutes on a host or whenever there is any state changing operation on the VM (i.e. start/stop/save/etc.). It collects perf counter information of both the host and all the VM’s on a given host.

VirtualCenter Refresher: Runs every 30mins and refreshes VC properties, ESX hosts and resource pools that are managed by this VC. Can be manually triggered on the UI or through cmdlet.

User Role Refresher: Runs every 30mins and updates user role properties.

PRO Tip Refresher: Runs every 30secs. It looks for PRO specific alerts in OpsMgr and reconciles the PRO tips in our DB against the data that is brought back from OpsMgr. This refresher cannot be manually triggered.

Thanks for reading and hope this is useful,

Cheng

VMM and PowerShell

Cheng Wei — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:03:00 GMT

We, at SCVMM team, have made our automation and integration stories super easy and fun through the powerful PowerShell interface. And the reason we chose PowerShell is that it is not only a powerful commandline tool for IT admins, it also provides strong API level integration capabilities and automation framework for ISVs. (See Jeffrey's comments about "PowerShell is not a CLI"). Even VMware is following our footsteps and released a VMware PowerShell toolkits last month.

If you have tried our PS cmdlets or have been to one of our techtalks (MMS/ITForum/TechEd/TechReady/etc.), you'd know that we have 160+ PowerShell cmdlets and you can do everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) that you can do on our admin console on PowerShell. Not only that, you can actually do more through our PowerShell interface than through our admin console. Please also note that our PowerShell concept has been there since our v1 (SCVMM 2007) release. And most of the commonly used VM managment scripts should work on both releases.

Here are some of the highlights of our PowerShell interface, and, as attachment, you can find the demo script we showed in various trade / tech shows that we hope you or your customers will find useful (note: highly recommend use with Jeffrey's magic start-demo script)

From a system architecture point of view, our Admin Console and Self-Service Portal are completely built on top of our PowerShell layer ==> meaning all UI requests are sent to the VMM server in the form of cmdlets that are grouped into job.
Our PowerShell layer always responds to request with the requesting object type, as well as a job handle, from which you can obtain job progress, status, and other audit information.
We abstract the virtualization platforms out of the cmdlets, so that, for example, you always use "Start-VM" to start a VM no matter the host is a Virtual Server host, a Hyper-V host, or a VMWare ESX host. It is our VMM Server who does all the translations and makes appropriate calls into various virtualization platforms in the language they understand. And you don't need to change your script when running against new or various virtualization platforms. This allows consistent and easy scripting when it comes to a heterogeneous virtualization environment.
Our admin console has four places where we integrate with our own PowerShell interface:

There is a PowerShell command button on the UI toolbar. And when you launch PowerShell from this button, we automatically load SCVMM snap-ins and automatically connect to the VMM Server that this console is connected to.
We have a "View Script" button on EVERY wizard. No matter it's "New VM" or "Add Hosts", at the end of the wizard, you can always click on the "View Script" button to see exactly what PowerShell script we are going to launch. This is a great way to learn PowerShell or just to confirm your curiosity on what's happening under the hood. :-)
SCVMM library stores and manages PowerShell scripts. You can create, view, modify and even run PowerShell right from the library.
Our "Jobs" view also provides information on what cmdlet has been run and what properties of the object have been changed. Again, it provides a very detailed auditing trail.

Our cmdlets provide flexible methods to access to various objects.

Typically, you can access the object directly by use "Get-<object class>" with parameter "-Name".
Or, you can access to an object by traverse down our object hiearchy (for exameple, you can access VM by visiting VMHost).
Or, you can access to an object by traverse up our object hiearchy (for exameple, you can access VMHost by visiting VM).

To further enable custom application / integration, we also have 10 custom fields, each of which can hold 2048 worth of data. You could literally load any of those custom field with a lot of data in the form of an XML file. So, do take advantage of them in your PowerShell scripting or integration.
As some of our sample integration work,

Our PRO tip implementation is based on our PowerShell cmdlets.
the VM offline patching whitepaper is implemented by integrating VMM and SCCM through our PowerShell interface.

Lastly but not leastly, check out our extensive cmdlet help, which not only contains the synopsis, syntax, detailed description to each parameters, but also extensive complete samples that you can just cut & paste for basic operations.

We love PowerShell! :-) And we hope you will soon fall in love with our 160+ PowerShell cmdlets too. :-)

Hope this helps and thanks for reading!

Cheng

Add host into VMM 2008 Beta

Cheng Wei — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:56:00 GMT

Well, once you finish installing VMM Server and have your admin console setup, the next you want to do is to start managing your hosts. Virtual Server hosts, Hyper-V hosts and VMware ESX hosts.

I talked about managing VMware VCS and how VMM imports the existing ESX hosts managed by the VCS. Next, let me drill into how you can start adding Virtual Server hosts and Hyper-V hosts, as well as some AddHost limitations in this Beta release.

This is what you will see in the Add Host wizard from the admin console for our VMM 2008 beta release:

(Note: This UI will change by our RTM.)

First, here are some requirements for adding hosts with different types of virtualization platforms:

To add a Virtual Server host

You must have Windows Server 2003.
In beta release, we do not support Virtual Server running on Windows Server 2008.
We're looking to provide support for running Virtual Server on Windows Server 2008 in our RTM release.
The Virtual Server needs to be at version 2005 R2 SP1 release.

To add a Hyper-V host

You must have Windows Server 2008.
Your computer must meet the hardware virtualization assistance requirements:

64-bit CPU
VT (Virtualization Technology feature from Intel) or AMD-V (from AMD) enabled on the BIOS
NX (No eXecute) /XD (eXecute Disable)
And full BIOS support for hardware virtualization

You must install Hyper-V RC0 software update.

To add a VMware ESX host

You must have at least one VMware VirtualCenter Server added to VMM.
Your VirtualCenter Server must be running version 2.0 or above.
Your ESX host must be running version 3.0 or 3.1.

Here are the things your need to know for different types of server (server locations):

To add a trusted domain joined Windows host

Make sure the requirements for the virtualization platform are met (see above).
Make sure the server is domain joined.
Make sure your server is reachable (DNS, AD, network firewall, etc.).
Make sure you know the proper credentials you need to let VMM use to manage the host.
Note: When there is no two-way trust between the VMM server domain and the domain the Windows host (to be added), you will need to use to do it from the CLI (Add-VMHost cmdlet) by using the "-NonTrustedDomainHost" switch. In our Beta release, you cannot do this from the UI.

To add a perimeter network (or DMZ) Windows host or a non-domain-joined Windows host

Make sure the requirements for the virtualization platform are met (see above).
Make sure the agent is installed locally, and security file is generated and transfered to the VMM console.
Make sure your server is reachable (DNS, network firewall, etc.).

To add a VMware ESX host

Make sure you have at least one VMware VirtualCenter Server added to VMM.
Make sure you know the "root" user credential.

Thanks for reading,

Cheng

VMM 2008 Architecture

Cheng Wei — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:21:00 GMT

If you are in MMS 2008, you've probably seen this architecture diagram:

For folks who did not get a chance to go, here are some of the key architectual characteristics that I'd like to point out:

On the top-left corner, notice that the UIs (admin console and self-service portal) are all 100% built on top of Powershell. What does this mean? It means that

Everything you do on the UI can be done through powershell. All actions/jobs are 100% scriptable.
In addition, if you are a "script-junkie", :-), you can do more via our powershell interface than what's made available on the UI. Yes, power to Powershell!

Notice the "Connector" sitting between VMM and SCOM, which is part of the new PRO (Performance and Resource Optimization) feature, and that allows a faster message/information sharing between VMM and SCOM.
In the mid of the picture, notice the horizontal single layer of "Management Interfaces". What is so interesting about that?

We have abstracted different virtualization platforms and their APIs, and present a set of consistent and platform-agnostic cmdlets and UI interfaces to perform your heterogeneous host and VM management operations.
It's totally transparent (I mean "no op" here) to you, no matter you are sending an instruction to a Windows Hyper-V host, a VMware ESX host or a Virtual Server host. This is what we call simplified management experience. :-)

On the lower-right corner, it shows how we're managing VMware ESX hosts via VCS (VirtualCenter Server). Most of the host and VM operations are done directly with VCS from VMM server. Note that VMM server may still need to communicate with ESX hosts directly when there is need for file-level enumeration (for example, Save State or Clone VM, etc.).

Thanks for reading,

Cheng