joshua.frederici.net

So as you may have guessed, I work with VMware a bit in my employment. On top of that, I’ve tried to start using PowerShell to automate repetitive tasks that I run into. (In fact, one of the major points of the existence of this page is to give myself a location to store these findings in a place which I can find them later, and if someone else finds them useful, then great.)

Anyway, the problem I ran into today was that I had a VM on a datastore whose name did not match a VM in my vCenter inventory. How could I tell if these files were in use by a legitimate VM or just wasting space? I could right-click and ‘Edit Settings’ on hundreds of VM’s… or I could use Powershell.

so I started off by connecting to the vCenter server and getting an inventory of VM’s:


Connect-VIServer servername
$VM = Get-VM


Then I grabbed a list of disks which matched my criteria:

$Disks = $VM | Get-HardDisk | Where {$_.FileName -like '*web*' }

Then I did…

$Disks | Get-Member and saw that there are Name, FileName, and ParentID properties. By doing $Disks | Select Name, FileName, ParentID,  I now have the parent Id of the VM.

So how do I know which VM the parent ID field references?

$VM | Where {$_.Id -like 'parent id from previous select'}

… which returns ….


Name PowerState Num CPUs Memory (MB)
---- ---------- -------- -----------
WebSrv1 PoweredOn 4 4096


Is there an easier way to do this? Probably, and I already have a couple of ideas. If I can get them working and cleaned up, I’ll post them here.

I recently had a need to examine the last refresh time of a large number of SCCM collections. We had a group of collections which are used to define maintenance windows for various servers, and we wanted to ensure that all these collections were updating regularly (and to fix the ones that weren’t).

Normally, I would take such a boring task and look for some way to automate it. I have a co-worker who evangelizes about the merits of PowerShell every chance he gets and we were able to put together a few lines to get the information I was looking for.

So obviously this requires that you have PowerShell installed, and it does require PowerShell v2. We used the SCCM PowerShell module located here, which appears to be the most “complete” unofficial PowerShell module I’ve found so far.

Once your PowerShell environment is configured, connecting to an SCCM server is as easy as:
$SCCMServer = Connect-SCCMServer servername

Next, you can do other things like:
# get all SCCM collections
$AllCollections = Get-SCCMCollection -SccmServer $SCCMServer

#show all not updated today
$a | where {$_.LastRefreshTime -notlike ‘20100621*’} | select Name

Instead of getting a list of all collections, you could target only certain ones:
$a = Get-SCCMCollection -sccmserver $sccm | where {$_.name -like 'Test*'} | Select name

The lines above were enough to save me tons of time I would otherwise spend manually verifying each collections properties. There are plenty of other opprotunities in this module including the ability to gather all sorts of information about advertisements, collections, sites, and packages, and I plan to continue to look for opprotunities where using these tools can allow me to work more efficiently.

I posted previously about attending a Microsoft authorized training course on Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (officially shortened to ConfigMgr, but commonly referred to as SCCM). After that course, I had intended on taking the exam but as the product was not one in which I was involved with regularly, and some life stuff that got in the way, I put it off.

This year my work responsibilities have shifted and I’m now managing my employer’s ConfigMgr environment. I’ve spent time since getting back up to speed on the product, remembering those details from the class and learning other details which you can only get by experience on a “real-world” deployment. Because I’ve been so deep in ConfigMgr lately, it seemed to only make sense that I should get the test out of the way, and the fact that Microsoft’s “Second Shot” program is nearing an end prompted me to start studying.

Overall, I would say the biggest study tool I used was my employment. Aside from that, I also used this book which I have found to contain a good amount of information.  Microsoft also has information on its page which gives details about the exam, skills measured, and recommend training; that information can be found here.