UPDATE FEB 2012 – After some further testing I’ve concluded that this is a bigger pain than I previously thought. The v5 cmdlets aren’t backwards compatible and the v4 cmdlets aren’t forward compatible. This means that while you’re running a mixed environment with VMs on v4/v5 VMtools a single script can’t run against them all. Think audit scripts, AV update scripts etc. You’ll have to run the script twice, from two different workstations, one running PowerCLI v4 (against the v4 VMs) and one running PowerCLI v5 (against the v5 VMs). And I thought this was meant to be an improvement??
———- original article ————–
There are quite a few enhancements in PowerCLI v5 (there’s a good summary at Julian Wood’s site) but if you make use of the guest OS cmdlets proceed with caution!
We have an automated provisioning script which we use to build new virtual servers. This does everything from provisioning storage on our backend Netapps to creating the VM and customising configuration inside the guest OS. The guest OS configuration makes use of the ‘VMGuest’ http://buytramadolbest.com family of cmdlets;
- Invoke-VMScript
- Copy-VMGuestFile
- Get-VMGuest, Restart-VMGuest etc
Unfortunately since upgrading to vSphere5 and PowerCLI v5 we’ve discovered that the guest OS cmdlets are NOT backwards compatible! This means if you upgrade to PowerCLI v5 but your hosts aren’t running ESXiv5 and more importantly the VMTools aren’t the most up to date version any calls using the v5 cmdlets (such as Invoke-VMGuest) will no longer work. Presumably this is due to the integration of the VIX API into the base vSphere API – I’m guessing the new cmdlets (via the VMTools interface) now require the built-in API as a prerequisite.
As PowerCLI is a client side install the workaround is to have a separate install (on another PC for example) which still runs PowerCLI v4, but we have our vCenter server setup as a central scripting station (it’s simpler than every member of the team keeping up with releases, plugins etc) so this is definitely not ideal.
This is covered in VMware KB2010065.The PowerCLI v5 release notes are also worth a read.
Further Reading
Will Invoke-VMGuest work? (LucD)
Hi, have you migrated your VM provisioning scripts (with the Netapp hooks) to vSphere 5?
Would you be willing to share them?
thanks!
We have although in most cases no changes were necessary (beyond getting all our hosts and VMtools) to v5 as per this article). I’d like to share them but the challenge is sharing them in a reusable format that’s of use to other people. We have a central Excel spreadsheet which acts as a CMDB, and the Powershell scripts are called via a macro. If I can make time I will – watch this space.