VMware vSphere PowerCLI scripts to make your ESX Admin life easier

VMware vSphere PowerCLI is an extremely powerful command line utility you can use to automate every aspect of your ESX environment.  We’re talking every level from VMs, the host OS, storage, networking, licensing, and more!  Basically its a ton of PowerShell cmdlets specifically for ESX that sit on top of Windows PowerShell.

You can download it here if you never played with it before:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/automationtools/windows_toolkit?view=overview

They have very good documentation and sample scripts to try out at the link above.  Now the fun part.  What’s the first script you should try out?  My advice is vCheck by Alan Renouf.

PowerCLI vCheck (Daily Report) – http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/11/04/vcheck-daily-report-v3/ – Without a doubt one of my favorite PowerCLI scripts.  Every morning when you arrive to the office, you can have an email report waiting in your Outlook Inbox with the status of your entire ESX environment.  Every aspect of it.  From old snapshots to resource utilization on your clusters, it’s all there.  I first started using it at version 1 but version 2 is even slicker!  If you are an ESX admin, you NEED to be using this script!  The lastest version 3 came out the other day and I haven’t used it in a production environment yet but you can download it at the link above.  Al has gone back to calling it vCheck by the way instead of Daily Report.  I’ll be tweaking V3 at home this weekend hopefully if I have the time and test it out.

You can see more scripts from Alan on his blog:

http://www.virtu-al.net/script-list/

I could list them all here with descriptions but he’s done a good job of keeping everything organized in the link above. Try them out!  Let me know if you have any favorite scripts you use.  I’m always looking for new scripts to make life easier so share please. 🙂