From time to time we need to check that VMware Distributed Port Groups are following our standard configuration. If there is only a few port group this can be done manually but in my case I need to check a few hundred.

Since there are so many I wanted to make a script that will export the configuration of each port group and out put to a CSV.

In this post we will be going through using PowerCLI to report on the configuration setting for all distributed virtual switch port groups.

I used the PowerCLI developer doc to find the required commands to check each port group configuration settings and policies.

https://developer.vmware.com/docs/powercli/latest/products/vmwarevsphereandvsan/categories/vdport/

First we need to get the list of Distributed Virtual Switches (VDS)

Once we have the list of switches we can use the below command to return all port groups.

Get-VDPortgroup -VDSwitch switchname

Next we can take one port group and start to view the properties to get the required info.

The below will view the general port group settings like VLAN, port bindings and Numbers or ports.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name portgroupname |fl

To view the override policy use the below command.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name portgroupname | Get-VDPortgroupOverridePolicy

To view the teaming policy use the below.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name portgroupname | Get-VDUplinkTeamingPolicy

For team policies the name in PowerCLI is different than in the web UI, the below table will match up the names

To view the security policy use the below.

Get-VDPortgroup -Name portgroupname | Get-VDSecurityPolicy

Now that I have all the different policy and configuration settings I can create the script.

I will be using a hash table for all export the configuration and policy settings.

The full script can be download from my GitHub repository link below.

https://github.com/TheSleepyAdmin/Scripts/blob/master/VMware/Network/VMwarePortGroupConfig.ps1

The script can be run to either output the configuration details to the PowerShell console using the below command.

.\VMwarePortGroupConfig.ps1 -VCServer vCenter

The second option is to export to CSV file by using the -ReportExport parameter.

.\VMwarePortGroupConfig.ps1 -VCServer vCenter -ReportExport .\

The below is what the CSV output should look like.

In this post we will be going through creating local ESXi account using PowerCLI.

Recently I have had to create local account to allow a monitoring tool to pull information from all ESXi hosts.

We want to automate the user creation and assign the required permissions so that they only have the permission required for a limited time.

First we need to connect to the ESXi Host using PowerCLI

Connect-VIServer

To check what account already exist use the below.

Get-VMHostAccount

To create a new account we will use the New-VMHostAccount command

New-VMHostAccount -Id accountname -Password password -Description Account Description

Next we need to assign the required permissions. We can list the current roles using

Get-VIRole

We also need an entity to set the permission or the command will error out.

To list the entity use the

Get-Folder

Select the entity that will have the role applied. In this case we will be applying to the root object so it applies to all objects on the host and will assigning the admin role.

New-VIPermission -Entity (Get-Folder root) -Principal accountname -Role Admin

To remove the account use the below command.

Get-VMHostAccount -User account name | Remove-VMHostAccount -Confirm:$false

Once we have the commands, we can create the script to automate the account creation and role assignment to configure multiple hosts.

The scripts uses EsxiHost as the heading for the CSV if you want to use something different the script will need to be updated.

Below is the script running against my test hosts.

.\Create-LocalESXiUser.ps1 -ESXiHostList .\EsxiHosts.csv -ESXiUser useraccount -ESXipass password -ESXiNewUser accountname -ESXiUserPass accountpass -ESXiPermission Permission -ESXiUserdesc "Account Description"

This process can also be used to update the permission for a specific account.

To download the full script use the below link to github.

https://github.com/TheSleepyAdmin/Scripts/blob/master/VMware/Config/Account/Create-LocalESXiUser.ps1

In this post we will be going through deploying new SNMP configuration to a list of ESXi hosts using PowerCLI. We can add SNMP using ssh and esxcli commands but this will required SSH to be enabled and connecting to each host.

We can use Set-VMHostSNMP command to set the SNMP configuration by conecting to the host using connect-viserver which uses https to connect and does not required SSH to be enabled.

First we need to connect to the ESXi host

Connect-VIServer -Server esxihost.domain.local

use a local account like root to connect

If you get a certificate error and can’t connect you might need to update the PowerCLI Configuration or install the root cert to trust the self singed cert of the ESXi hosts.

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -Confirm:$false

Once connected we will be using the below set of command to configure the SNMP settings.

Get-VMHostSnmp | Set-VMHostSnmp

https://developer.vmware.com/docs/powercli/latest/vmware.vimautomation.core/commands/set-vmhostsnmp/#Default

First we will enabled and set the community string

Get-VMHostSnmp | Set-VMHostSnmp -Enabled:$true -ReadOnlyCommunity communityname

Next we will set the target that traps will be sent.

Get-VMHostSnmp | Set-VMHostSnmp -TargetCommunity communityname -TargetHost snmp.domain.local -TargetPort 162 -AddTarget

To test I have setup snmp on Ubutu

Now that we have set of command we can create the script. I will be doing a loop through each host and configuring the SNMP.

I also added in some if statement to check if SNMP is already enabled and to check if the target host matches the one that is set in the parameters.

The full script can be downloaded from the below github link.

https://github.com/TheSleepyAdmin/Scripts/blob/master/VMware/Config/SNMP/Set-ESXiSNMP.ps1

Below is an example of what the csv file should look like if you want to use a different heading the script will need to be updated.

Each of the values will be called as parameter to allow easy re-use below is an example of the SNMP script running against my test hosts.

Using PowerCli can be a quicker way to set and enabled SNMP on a list of hosts rather than having to SSH and use esxcli command. This can also be used to update the existing SNMP configuration to a new traps target.

During a recent project we have been starting to use network segregation to give more security and control instead of using a flat network.

This has lead to VM’s being broken up in to there own VMware port groups and segregated VLAN’s.

There are now old port groups that have had all VM’s removed, so we wanted to report on any port groups that have no VM’s associated so that they can be removed as we will hit a issue with max VLAN limit per physical interface.

The quickest way I could think of to create the report was to use PowerCLI, in this post we will go through the process and commands used to create the report.

First we need to connect to vCenter using PowerCLI

We will be using a few different commands in the script.

First we will need to get list of port groups will only be getting distributed port groups as we don’t use standard port groups.

Get-VDPortgroup

Second part of the script is to get the port group view using get-view

Get-View -ViewType Network -Property Name -Filter @{"Name" = "portgroup name"}

We will be using UpdateViewData to add some addtional values to the view to make the script quicker and easier to read see below link for more details on UpdateViewData.

https://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2011/08/optimize-the-performance-of-powerclis-views.html

To find the properties we wanted to report on we used

Get-VM -Name VMName | Get-View

Use Get-VIObjectByVIView to get the host information.

$vm = Get-VM -name VMName | get-view
(Get-VIObjectByVIView $vm.runtime.host).name

I want to report on the VM name, Host, Cluster and PowerState.

Below we will get the view for the port group and update the view with the additional details that I want in the report.

$networks = Get-View -ViewType Network -Property Name -Filter @{"Name" = "portgroup name"}

$networks | ForEach-Object{($_.UpdateViewData("Vm.Name","Vm.Runtime.Host.Name","Vm.Runtime.Host.Parent.Name","vm.Runtime.PowerState"))}

We can run the below to check if the addtional information has been added to the veiw

$networks.LinkedView.vm.name

Once we have the view working and adding the properties we want we can start to create the full script.

The full script can be copied from the below github link.

https://github.com/TheSleepyAdmin/Scripts/blob/master/VMware/Network/VMware_PortGroupReport.ps1

There are two parameters in the script.

To just output to the console screen use -ConsoleOnly parameter.

To export to csv use the -ReportExport parameter.

Below is a example of the exported csv.

With the release of VMware PowerCLI 12.4 I was updating the module on my LAB servers so I could check out the new command.

When upgrading I was getting the below error which is due to VMware changing the certificate authority used to publish the new module.

Authenticode issuer ‘E=noreply@vmware.com, CN=”VMware, Inc.”, O=”VMware, Inc.”, L=Palo Alto, S=California, C=US’ of the new module ‘VMware.VimAutomation.Sdk’ with version ‘12.4.0.18627054’ from root
certificate authority.

In the release notes from VMware there is a know issue with the certificate. The fix is to remove and re-install the module.

https://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2021/09/powercli-12-4-whats-new.html

I though I would do a quick post on this incase anyone doesn’t know the process.

To check where the module is installed run the below command.

Get-Module -ListAvailable VMware.PowerCLI

In my case the module was installed in C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules.

Next we need to remove the old modules, below is a list of the folders that make up the VMware PowerCLI 12.0 module.

After removing the folder we now have to install the new module using Install-Module

Install-Module VMware.PowerCLI

Once completed we should now have PowerCLI version 12.4

In this post we will be going through using the PowerCLI Get-EsxCli commandlet, which is used to call EsxCli command from PowerShell instead of having to SSH directly to the the ESXi host.

This can be useful when trying to gather information from multiple hosts instead of connecting on to each host with SSH or updating configuration settings.

First step is to connect to vCenter, once connected we can run the Get-EsxCli command and this will return the list of namespaces that can be use to gather information or set configuration settings.

We will be using -V2 as this sets Get-EsxCli to use version 2 interface as version 1 is being deprecated and will be removed in a later version.

Get-EsxCli -VMHost esxihost -V2

We can set the Get-EsxCli command to a variable so that we can call the namespaces, below will call the network namespace, once called there will be a list of addtiaonl namespaces that can be called.

$vmhostesxcli = Get-EsxCli -VMHost esxihost -V2
$vmhostesxcli.network

Once we select a namespace there should also be a list of methods that can be called these can be used to run specific actions like list or get to return information.

To list all nic’s we can call the nic and then list namespace

$vmhostesxcli.network.nic.list.invoke()

To gather info on details like driver version we can use the get method, in v1 you use to be able to call the nic name directly but if you try this in v2 the below error will be returned.

If specified, the arguments parameter must contain a single value of type Hashtable.

This is due to the method requiring a hash table parameter. If we call the help method it should return the valid parameters. If the parameter has a hyphens remove this or the command wont work.

For the nic namespace the parameter is nicname and needs to be called as a hash table.

$vmhostesxcli.network.nic.get.invoke(@{nicname="vmnic1"})

There might be some namespaces that have multiple properties like driverinfo under nic, these can be called by adding the property like below.

$vmhostesxcli.network.nic.get.invoke(@{nicname="vmnic1"}).DriverInfo

Now that we have the command we can start to build out a script to export information.

In this case we will be getting all hosts, listing all NIC’s and getting the drivers info.

The above shows that Get-EsxCli can be very good for retrieving information, if we wanted to set a configuration we can use similar command syntax but use the set method.

In this case we will update the Power policy settings on all host, we could do this manually by going to the Configure > Hardware > Overview > Power Management one each host and update the power policy settings

but doing this on a larger cluster is a lot of effort. To update using PowerCli we can first create the script to report on the current host power policy.

To update the policy settings we will use the set method like the below.

$vmhostesxcli.hardware.Power.policy.set.Invoke(@{id="1")})

Below are the 4 different power policy’s.

We can then take the above and create a re-usable script to report or set the power policy on all host in one go.

To download a copy of the either of the above script use the below link to my Github these can be used as reference if you want to create your own scripts for other settings.

https://github.com/TheSleepyAdmin/Scripts/tree/master/VMware/EsxCli