Virtually Jason

A while back, I posted a quick script to create commands for  1:1 Zoning on a Brocade Fiber Switch .  I was recently helping someone go through that exact process on a set of switches that had a lot of aliases already defined on them.  Their challenge was that they weren't sure which aliases were for their current SAN vs. a retired SAN.  Rather than just creating zones for both SANs, I decided to put together a quick script that would scrape their current Aliases and check which ones have active WWNs currently in the system.  They could then use this information to prune the Aliases that are no longer needed, in addition to only creating the required zones for our project. In order to do this task, I had to do some quick string parsing into PowerShell objects .  Good thing I already know how to do that ;)  So, I put together this script which does two things: 1) It parses the Brocade Fiber Switch's configuration to look for any Aliases 2) It checks...

Every now and then, I find myself needing to use a utility like plink in order to interface with a system, such as a switch or a chassis, during a script.  If I'm just sending configuration commands (and am taking it on faith that they worked...), then it's nice and easy, but if I actually want to extract information from the device, then I've got a bit of a challenge, because those devices (via plink) are not going to give me back an object that PowerShell understands. For example, if I use get-vm in PowerShell, I will get back a vm object that has a bunch of properties, which I can easily access using dot notation.  If I use plink to pull a brocade switch configuration, all I'm going to get back (from PowerShell's perspective) is a great big long string with lots of New Line characters, tabs and spaces.  So, how do I extract data from a formatted text string, in order to more easily work with it in PowerShell?  Well, there's a lot of different tricks availab...

One of my customers is migrating a lot of ESXi hosts (with a strong naming convention) from one network onto a new network with a pre-defined IP Addressing scheme based around fully populated HP C7000 blade enclosures (containing 16 blades).  The host naming convention is <Site>-<Enclosure ID>-ESX<Blade Slot Number>.<FQDN>.  Based on this, I've been tasked with automating as much of this migration as possible, and part of that is automatically assigning the new IP Addresses to the blades. In order to do this, I'm using the new-vmhostnetworkadapter cmdlet.  That cmdlet will need several parameters in order to work: -virtualswitch -portgroup -IP -subnetmask Most of these are trivial, as they will be constant for every host in the environment.  The big exception to that statement is the IP address parameter.  As I said earlier though, due to the strong naming convention at this site we can derive the host's new IP address entirely f...

I've been working with PowerShell a lot recently and stumbled a little bit with String Manipulation.  So, I've decided to post some details of what I've learned, to hopefully help others avoid my mistakes. String manipulation can be very important when scripting, especially if the purpose of the script is to output a human readable report.  First, there's a great TechNet article on string manipulation in PowerShell .  It covers the basics in great detail; my intent is to supplement that article with some of the pain points that I came across while using those techniques. How to Trim a String Trimming a string simply means removing characters from the ends of that string.   There are 3 Trim commands: .Trim() .TrimStart() and .TrimEnd().  As the names imply, TrimStart() removes characters from the start of a string, TrimEnd() removes characters from the end of a string, and Trim() removes characters from both ends of the string.  Those Trim commands ar...