Parsing HP CLI Output

I've been working on an environment audit for one of my customers (expect to see some of those scripts popping up in the not-too-distant future).  In addition to auditing ESXi host configurations, I've been looking at their HP C7000 Chassis configurations and comparing them against enterprise standards.  Since there are a lot of chassis in this environment, I've been leveraging scripts to collect data via plink.

It's not always easy to parse data from an SSH session into PowerShell objects, but HP gave us a great tool in their CLI (way better than adjusting column size, which is what I was looking for when I came across this).  It's already well documented, but it saved me so much time that I figured that it was worth mentioning anyway... the HP CLI commands support this great option: -output=script2.  There's actually a couple of "script#" options, but I'm particularly fond of #2.  So, what's it do?  Well, it turns this style of human friendly output:

->show network
=============================================================================
Name        Type  Status  Shared      VLAN   Native    Private   Preferred
                          Uplink Set  ID     VLAN                Speed
=============================================================================
INTERNAL_V  Enet  OK      -- --       -- --  -- --     Disabled  Auto
C1
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTERNAL_V  Enet  OK      -- --       -- --  -- --     Disabled  Auto
C2


... into this style of actually usable output:

->show network -output=script2
Name;Type;Status;Shared Uplink Set;VLAN ID;Native VLAN;Private;Preferred Speed
INTERNAL_VC1;Enet;OK;-- --;-- --;-- --;Disabled;Auto
INTERNAL_VC2;Enet;OK;-- --;-- --;-- --;Disabled;Auto

That's right!  It formats the output of the commands out of the "graphical" table format (with those terrible line breaks) into a semicolon delimited list!  From there, it's trivial to parse it into an array of PowerShell objects with the following command (assuming that you've stored your HP CLI output in the $CLIOutput variable):

$CLIOutput | convertfrom-csv -delimiter ";"

And there you go!  No messy line counting or searching for indexes based on strings that you expect to be there, just nice, clean PowerShell objects!  Bear in mind that some of the properties on these objects will have spaces in the names, so to reference them you may need to use quotes (such as $CLIOutput."Preferred Speed").

Comments

Post a Comment

Sorry guys, I've been getting a lot of spam recently, so I've had to turn on comment moderation. I'll do my best to moderate them swiftly after they're submitted,

Popular posts from this blog

Clone a Standard vSwitch from one ESXi Host to Another

One of my customers is standardizing the configurations on their HP C7000 enclosures (they've been set up at various sites by various administrators with varying involvement from the architecture team).  As such, we need to stand up some temporary resources so that we can take down the main enclosure for reconfiguration.  That's fine, we can easily ship a smaller enclosure to each site for temporary compute resources.  Some of the sites are using Standard vSwitches, so we need to be able to quickly copy the networking configuration over from their existing blades to these new, slightly different blades.  As I see it, we had 2 good options: 1) Capture a Host Profile with the desired vSwitch configuration.  Delete every other component of the Host Profile so that only the networking section is applied; design the new ESXi hosts so that the vSwitches'll work with the old vmnic-to-vswitch configurations. 2) Write a script to clone the vSwitch from ones ESXi host...
Read more

PowerShell Sorting by Multiple Columns

PowerShell's Sort-Object cmdlet is super useful, especially when preparing output for human consumption.  A few people have found my blog while looking for more information about its use, specifically while looking for how to sort by multiple columns (well, properties, technically).  I've never done so (much less written about it), so I hope those folks found answers elsewhere.  But, it got me curious... and it turns out that it's really easy. The Technet article on Sort-Object has the answer directly spelled out: just use commas to create a list of properties to sort by (in order to precedence).  Let's look at some examples!  First, prepare a variable with some good sortable data: $myData = get-eventlog System -newest 25 And then we can get to sorting!  Say you want to sort primarily by EntryType (Warning, Information, Error) and then by Source.  Easy-peasy: $myData | sort EntryType,Source How about if you want it to be in descending or...
Read more

Deleting Orphaned (AKA Zombie) VMDK Files

A problem that most Virtualization Administrators need to deal with is Orphaned VMDK files (or Zombie VMDK files, as some people call them).  These are Virtual Machine hard drive files that are just hanging out, taking up storage, but are attached to no VMs.  How can this happen?  Well, the most common way is when an administrator needs to delete a VMDK but isn't quite ready to commit... so, after pressing "remove", they select "remove from virtual machine" rather than "remove and delete files".  The intent is always good: "I want to be able to restore this if it turns out to be necessary... so I'll just come back and delete it next week if nothing breaks!"  But, of course, next week something else happens and the file doesn't get deleted.  After a little while, it turns into "which files did I rename, again?" and nothing seems to happen. So, how do you deal with these orphaned files?  Well, a few years ago I found a scrip...
Read more