Note to Self: Learn Get-View

Queue Deflation

I’m rather red-faced right now.  I chimed in with a reply in the VMTN VMware vSphere PowerCLI forum and promptly got schooled.

Which is great; these things should happen.

Where’s the Template?

In this thread, VMTN Communities member denjoh44 asked how one would obtain a list of templates along with the name of the vSphere hosts on which they reside.

I haven’t had the need to do this myself, but I wanted to give it a shot. I fired up PowerShell ISE and plugged away:

And it works, which is nice.

I See Your 12 Lines and…

It wasn’t long after that I revisited the thread only to find a much more elegant solution posted by Christophe Calvet:

My personality dictates that I should feel silly about my reply.  Christophe nailed it with a one-liner.  Instead, I’m going to focus on my inexperience with Get-View and do some reading.  I'll endeavor to always keep calculated expressions in mind as well.

Time to Learn

Brian Graf has a 3-part blog series on Get-View which I’ve seen before and marked for reading in more detail “later.”  If you are interested in learning more about Get-View, start here:

• Get-View Part 1: Introduction
• Get-View Part 2: Views and Extension Data
• Get-View Part 3: Performance Impact

While you are at it, Christophe has a blog worth checking out at TheCrazyConsultant.com

vSphere 5.5 Update 3 Patch Available

The Best Intentions

It was obvious and natural; the Right Thing to do.  In preparation for a deployment across all vSphere hosts we took the step of insuring the latest updates. And since we are running vSphere 5.5, this meant Update 3.

There was even some chest-thumping among our small team of generalists as they completed the task within short order.  And why not?

That was Short-Lived

Within 2 weeks we were crestfallen. Update 3 introduced a service-impacting defect involving seldom-used (sic) snapshots.  KB 2133118 was released to announce "unexpected signal: 11."  Consolidate or delete a snapshot and you may suffer a VM outage.

To be honest, I find the KB lacking in details--there are no specifics to indicate contributing factors or degree of impact across customers.

A New Hope?

While we haven't been impacted (whew!), I'm happy to see that today brings the release of patch ESXi550-201510401-BG to address this issue.

Fire up Update Manager and start patching!  Let us know how it goes, because I'm not sure that we wish to be first on this one.


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