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Thread: Submit your "Task that Sucks"


Permlink Replies: 8 - Pages: 1 - Last Post: Feb 5, 2010 6:35 AM by: Wimo Threads: [ Previous | Next ]
SHerold


Posts: 210
Registered: 11/7/08
Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Sep 16, 2009 3:44 PM
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Have tasks that suck? So do we. We've decided to clear our plates of our tedious tasks that suck as we near the Virtualization EcoShell 1.2 release and instead listen to some of the pain points that you guys have when managing your environments. As stated in the previous blog post, Virtualization EcoShell 1.2 will contain a solid set of Best Practice Filters. We want to take the most tedious virtualization tasks that you guys have of problems that you encounter daily and make sure we address them with our 1.2 release. Now is your chance to sound off in this forum to provide us with your own pain points that we can address for you. While we can't guarantee we'll address every concern, we'll sure try our best.

Simply post your virtualization Task that Sucks in this forum. While we definitely won't ban you if you want to provide a script along with it, it absolutely isn't required. We just want to absorb your pain. I was able to raid the Vizioncore closet of mystery and will have some SWAG that I'll send out to the person that I personally feel has identified the virtualization task that sucks the most based on an October 27th, 2009 deadline. While using Virtualization EcoShell, you may be able to literally watch the amount of time you are saving daily!

-Scott
AlanRenouf

Posts: 40
Registered: 10/8/08
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Sep 16, 2009 4:12 PM   in response to: SHerold
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VMs which are in folders that are not the same as their name - I have the VESI Script

Host Nic Speeds so we can sort them and make sure there are no 100MB - I have VESI script

Datastores with less than x% space left - I have script

VMs with No or out of date tools - I have Script

VMs with outdated hardware version (for people with vSphere) - I have script

VMs with connected Floppy or CD Rom Drives - I have script

NTP Services not running - I have script

VMs on Local Datastores - I have Script

VMs with CPU RDY% over x% - I have script

VMs with CPU affinity and the host they are on - You guessed it, script available !

Off the top of my head thats about it (for the moment)



VirtualisedReality

Posts: 19
Registered: 4/16/09
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Sep 17, 2009 1:20 AM   in response to: SHerold
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OK here is a quick few off the top of my head, Alan has mentioned a large number that are annoying. A lot of mine come from the consultant side rather than just day to day administration. I understand their are a lot of powershell scripts out there that could do a lot of what im asking, its just trying to find the time to improve my powershell skills enough to be confident with what im running and customising to my skill level.

As a consultant I maybe visit some of our customer only once or twice a year to add one new host or do some upgrades etc I need to compare all the key configuration settings across all hosts in a cluster, such as Service Console Memory, vSwitch names and number of uplinks, NTP is enabled and configured the same, DNS and Default Gateway is configured the same and all those other little settings you want to check are configured the same on all the hosts. << Would be lovely in a single report.

Working out what had changed in an enviorment that was working fine when you installed it. After leaving a working system with a customer and the customer then tweaking it and causing an issue. Would be nice to be able to run a report at the end of the project then run a report on the next visit that could tell you what had changed since the last report.

Health checks and documentation, theVESI has helped immensely with both of these but it still involves me running each report manually and then copying the data into word. This really isn't much of a hardship, but when trying to standardise documentation and healthchecks across multiple engineers it would be nice to be able to have some kind of report builder where you could select which VESI functions to run and then be able to export these as a settings file to give to all our engineers.

Finding orphaned snapshot delta's

Finding VM's that are named differently in the datastore to in the inventory then changing the datastore names.



Barry Coombs www.virtualisedreality.com
bconrad_093

Posts: 2
Registered: 9/17/09
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Sep 17, 2009 10:22 AM   in response to: SHerold
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Before EVC we had to apply individual CPUID masks (which at one time were supported) to each VM if running on a cluster with multiple CPU families.  Now that EVC is available it's best practice to remove or 'default' all those old, unsupported CPUID masks.

It's not easy to do this with PowerCli, it is possible to script/edit the .vmx files but that's not PowerShell-ish.

Consider creating an easy way to remove or default all CPUID masks from a powered-off VM.

Ben



rdavis_765

Posts: 2
Registered: 10/18/09
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Oct 18, 2009 3:21 PM   in response to: SHerold
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I'll try and post some more, but this one really gets at me.
I need a script to show which Windows VMs are using a Non-ACPI HAL.
These machines will never shut off without right clicking the VM and forcing them down, so they really need to be rebuilt and replaced. :)




rdavis_765

Posts: 2
Registered: 10/18/09
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Oct 18, 2009 3:23 PM   in response to: rdavis_765
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A script to replace older versions of Nics with Enhanced NICs, and reconfigure the VM would be great.




AlanRenouf

Posts: 40
Registered: 10/8/08
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Oct 19, 2009 3:13 AM   in response to: rdavis_765
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rdavis_765 wrote:
I'll try and post some more, but this one really gets at me.
I need a script to show which Windows VMs are using a Non-ACPI HAL.
These machines will never shut off without right clicking the VM and forcing them down, so they really need to be rebuilt and replaced. :)



I am in the process of adding my scripts to a custom powerpack, one of these includes the HAL script you mentioned, let me know if you would like to test it.

Alan



ChrisDearden

Posts: 1
Registered: 10/19/09
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Oct 19, 2009 7:22 AM   in response to: AlanRenouf
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VM's thats span Datastores.



Wimo

Posts: 1
Registered: 2/5/10
Re: Submit your "Task that Sucks"
Posted: Feb 5, 2010 6:35 AM   in response to: SHerold
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We keep having the problem of finding, usually long after VMs are deployed which makes it a pain to coordinate fixing it, that the storage team has allocated LUNs that have a different LUN ID down the 2 paths.  The boss wants me to work out a way to check out the entire existing environment, which to me sounds like a tedious manual job.  If under Best Practice Queries/Disk Queries there was a way to do this, wouldn't that be sweet!

BTW, hello everybody.  My first post.


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