Using Powershell values from the start of the pipeline in a table at the end.

There are two ways to deal with large arrays of nested objects in powershell.

One is a bunch of nested foreach loops which is nicely readable in scripts.

However the beauty of the pipeline is that you can run output from one command into the input for another, which is often the way to drill down into dependent objects.

One such example is Vmware portgroups in Powercli.

The hierachy can be several levels deep

e.g.

cluster
 -> host
   -> vswitch
      -> portgroup

I wanted to build a table showing portgroups on all hosts in a cluster, ignoring the default management kernel port

The command is quite simple.

Get-Cluster -name Cluster01 | Get-VMHost | Get-VirtualSwitch -name vSwitch0 | Get-VirtualPortGroup | where {$_.name -ne "Management Network" | select Name, VirtualSwitch | ft -autosize

This produces a nice table showing the portgourp name and the vswitch it's connected to.

However the hostname isn't a property of the portgroup, it's a property of the vswitch (or the host) so the question is how to show it in the table.

The answer is with the pipelinevariable command (introduced in PS4 and above) and a custom property expression.

Get-Cluster -name Cluster01 Get-VMHost | Get-VirtualSwitch -name vSwitch0 -PipelineVariable 'fi' | Get-VirtualPortGroup | where {$_.name -ne "Management Network"} | select Name, VirtualSwitch, @{Name = "VMHost";Expression = {($fi.vmhost)}} | ft -AutoSize

This returns a nice table of three columns, with the third column

Error scanning Dell hosts with VUM "Host cannot download files"

This is one possible solution for the error "Host cannot download files from VMware vSphere Update Manager patch store. Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details"


If you're running Dell hosts and Openmanage, there is an issue with the Openmanage VIB 8.2.0 - 8.5.0 (possibly other versions but these are the ones I've tested).

Unzip the file and have a look at the index.xml file



In my case the line containing the tag had a typo - you'd have thought Dell could spell their name, especially when it's only 4 characters long. 

Edit this to be Dell and re-zip the files (making sure the files are in the root of the zipfile)

 
 

The bad news is that you can't manually remove VIBs from the VUM database once they've been imported, so you basically have to nuke your VUM config so first make a note of all your baselines / baseline groups.

At least you no longer have to uninstall and reinstall the database - there is a tool called VMwareUpdateManagerUtility.exe in the Update Manager application folder which will reset the database.  Run it, point it at your VUM server, login and choose the Database settings -> re-initialize database option:





You should now be able to re-import the new VIB zipfile and perform a scan.

Unfortunately if you have alot of baselines or baseline groups, you'll need to recreate them.

Cannot create KDS Root Key - “Request is not supported”

When trying to run the powershell command Add-KDSRootKey –EffectiveImmediately you get the error "Request is not supported" if the powershell console isn't running elevated as administrator.

Just right click on the powershell icon and run as administrator and rerun the command.