Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Deploying Virtual Machines from PowerShell (VMware)

The below steps will allow you to deploy virtual machines based off a template, to a designated host and data store.

Requirements:
VMware VIToolKit
Microsoft Powershell

Steps:

1) Connect to your Virtual Center server using: Connect-VIServer
a) This will prompt you for the server name and password; once connected you can proceed
2) Enter all machines to be created in to an array: $array = "Machine1","Machine2","Machine3" (and so forth)
3) Define the host where the template resides: $host = "ESX Server Name (must be in DNS)"
4) Define the template to use for deploying these machines: $template = "Template Name"
5) Define the Data Store where the machines will be deployed to: $datastore = "Data Store Name"
5) Now to actually deploy the machines:

foreach ($vm in $array)
{
$vm=New-VM -Name $vm -Template $template -Host $host1 -Datastore $datastore
}



Now the machines will deploy one at a time to the defined server. You can specify resource pools if you deseire or you can move the machines once they are fully deployed.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

new twitter account... twitter.com/tomralph

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

first post

first post... Well why not add in a nice RobotChicken video

http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=8a2505951d8bc25a011d9d9ef2ba017c

more later.