Virtually Jason

One of my customers uses DRS groups heavily.  The environment contains a set of specialized ESXi servers for a specific subset of machines and a set of general ESXi servers for everything else.  However, in order to maximize availability, all of these ESXi servers are part of one big cluster.  That means that every VM in their environment must be a member of at least one DRS group, placing the VM on either these specialized ESXi servers or the general ESXi servers.  Until we get an automated solution in place (probably through Orchestrator), we need to depend on the administrators to place the VM in the correct group (almost always the general group) upon machine creation.  As you might expect, that's not going too well. So, I put together a quick PowerCLI script to detect any VMs that are not grouped and (optionally) place them into the specified group.  This is what I came up with! The script is easy to use, but it requires a non-standard PowerCLI module.  To get it working,

Last year, I wrote a post with a quick one-liner about how to ping all VMs on a given ESXi host .  Since then, I've been doing a lot of work with vSphere 6 upgrades, which has involved migrating many VMs between various switches.  As part of that process, I like to have an established basic test that I can run before and after the migration, so that I can record that the migration was successful. So, needless to say, I've expanded on that old one-liner a little bit... and now it's a full blown script.  I've built this script based around my migration validation use case, and so it has some very specific behaviors based around that.  It accepts four parameters, but really only two of them are required: -vmHost and -results.  As you certainly expect, -vmHost is the name of the host on which you want to ping all VMs and -results is a path to a file where the script will store its results (I just use a .txt file, myself). When the script is executed for the first time,

I often find myself working with CSV files when I'm writing PowerShell or PowerCLI scripts.  Of course, PowerShell has the native Import-CSV cmdlet , which works well... but it doesn't have much error checking.  After writing a bunch of script specific error checking, I've finally broken down and put together a function to do it for me.  Now, I can either add this function to my PowerShell profile, or just include it in any scripts that need it. The function is called Import-ValidCSV.  It basically just calls the normal Import-CSV cmdlet, but accepts a second arguement: -RequiredColumns.  The -ReqiredColumns argument is set up to accept an array of strings, listing all of the column headers that are required (duh!).  The function iterates through the list of RequiredColumns and checks that each column exists in the supplied CSV file.  If a column does not exist, it throws an error and quits.  If all columns exist (really, just if it doesn't throw an error and quit), i