Month: January 2019

If you are anything like me you’re setting up test or demo environments and then tearing them down a few hours later when you’re done with what ever testing you were doing. While setting up a VMware vSphere test environment is super easy using powershell/powercli (if you haven’t already visited William Lams web page, I highly recommend it and while you’re there grab the PowerShell scripts to deploy vSphere/vSAN/NSX environments. Kudos to William for everything you do for the vCommunity!!), I use his powershell scripts almost on a daily basis!

Now while setting up a single lab environment is usually not a big problem using the scripts provided by Willam but when you start setting up multiple labs (I typically have like 3 or 4 labs set up on any given time for different purposes) you might run out of some resources statically configured in the script, for instance your datastore configured doesn’t have enough capacity. So why not enhance the experience with dynamic selection of for instance datastore (or in my example: DatastoreCluster). Turns out it’s really easy to build an interactive dynamic menu of your datastoresclusters and use the menu to select where to install the lab environment.

I’m using a function to call the datastoreclusters I can use. I have a basic error handling included that you might need to extend. The code below includes 2 examples, the first function is calling available DatastoreClusters from a vCenter server and ordering them based on available free space and the second example gets a list of port groups available on my distributed switch. I’ve also assigned a default selection/value for faster deployments, just press enter to select the default value.

$VIServer = "vcsa.mydomain.com"
$VIUsername = "administrator@vsphere.local"
$VIPassword = "MyPassword"

Connect-VIServer $VIServer -User $VIUsername -Password $VIPassword -WarningAction SilentlyContinue

Function Show-DatastoreClusters ($Title = 'My Datastores'){
     Try {
     $AvailDatastores = (Get-Datastore | Where {$_.Type -eq "VMFS"} |Sort-Object -Descending FreeSpaceGB)
     $menuds = @{}
     For ($i=1;$i -le $AvailDatastores.count; $i++)
         { Write-Host "$i. $($AvailDatastores[$i-1].Name) - $([math]::Round($AvailDatastores[$i-1].FreespaceGB,1)) GB free space" 
         $menuds.Add($i,($AvailDatastores[$i-1].Name)) }
     [int]$ansds = if(($ansds = Read-Host "Select Datastore or press enter to accept default value [1]") -eq ''){"1"} else {$ansds}
     $DatastoreSelection = $menuds.Item($ansds) ; Get-Datastore $DatastoreSelection
     }
 Catch { Write-Host "The selection you made is unavailable, please make a valid selection between 1 and $($i-1)..." Start-Sleep 2 }
}

Function Show-PortGroups ($Title = 'My Portgroups'){
     Try {
     $AvailPortgroups = (Get-VDSwitch -Name "DSwitch" | Get-VDPortgroup)
     $menupg = @{}
     For ($i=1;$i -le $AvailPortgroups.count; $i++)
         { Write-Host "$i. $($AvailPortgroups[$i-1].Name)" 
         $menupg.Add($i,($AvailPortgroups[$i-1].Name)) }
     [int]$anspg = if(($anspg = Read-Host "Select portgroup or press enter to accept default value [7]") -eq ''){"7"}else{$anspg}
     $PortgroupSelection = $menupg.Item($anspg) ; Get-VDPortgroup $PortgroupSelection
     }
Catch { Write-Host "The selection you made is unavailable, please make a valid selection between 1 and $($i-1)..." Start-Sleep 2 }
}
cls
Write-Host `n
$VMDatastore = Show-DatastoreClusters
Write-Host `n
$VMNetwork = Show-Portgroups
Write-Host `n
$VMDatastore
$VMNetwork

Disconnect-VIServer $VIServer -Confirm:$false

The function above can then be included in the script from William Lam. When calling the function the output will look something like this (the menus being produced are highlighted in red):

If you’d like you can add some extra granularity when enumerating the datastore, expand the “Where” statement to just get the datastores with a specific name:

{$_.Type -eq "VMFS" -and $_.Name -like "VMFS-ESXi7*"}

Once you got you script fetching the desired data you can add the function to any script, I’ve added it to William’s script for some added flexibility.