Last week, the popular PowerActions Fling was updated to version 1.5.0 which now finally adds support for vSphere 6.0. PowerActions is a vSphere Web Client Plugin that allows administrators to easily execute PowerCLI scripts against inventory objects within the vSphere Web Client. This is a very powerful capability that PowerActions is providing and allows users to easily extend new and custom operations that may not be available within the vSphere Web Client. One such example is being able to easily issue a VMFS UNAMP which in vSphere 5.5 was only available through the use of ESXCLI, I actually demonstrated how easy it is to provide this capability using PowerActions which you can read more about here.
With the release of vSphere 6.0, we now have the ability to issue a VMFS UNMAP using the vSphere API which I have blogged about here among other new vSphere 6.0 APIs. Given that PowerActions now supports vSphere 6.0, I figured this would be a good opportunity to take advantage of the new vSphere 6.0 API using the updated version of PowerActions. I have created a new PowerCLI script called Issue UNMAP 2.0 on Datastore.ps1 which now uses the new UnmapVmfsVolumeEx_Task vSphere API to perform the VMFS UNMAP. I have also submitted a new pull request for this example to Alan Renouf's PowerActions Github repository.
Here is a screenshot of my running the new VMFS UNMAP PowerActions operation against one of my vSphere Datastores and you can that it successfully completed in the Recent Tasks bar.
In addition to the new VMFS UNAMP operation that can be added as a PowerAction, here are just a few other examples of new vSphere 6.0 capabilities that you can easily extend into a PowerAction:
- Perform XvC-vMotion (Migrating a VM between two different vCenter Servers which are NOT part of the same SSO Domain)
- Configure per-VMDK IOPS reservations
- Send an NMI request to a VM using the new vSphere 6.0 API described here
I am personally excited for the future and potential of PowerActions and I hope to see the PowerActions framework extend beyond just PowerCLI and support other scripting languages. I think this will be a very powerful capability that the vSphere Web Client can offer to our administrators, operators and developers.
Is there any way to support VMX file configuration values to a large number of VM VMX files? Once in a while, you may have a specific setting in 100 VMX files or more you need or want to change, and there is no good way to do this, at this time. And yet every time the VMware Hardening Guide changes the potential issues exists, especially in reference to VMX file lifecycle management.
>no good way?
Yes, there is 🙂 It's called Automation and in fact I've even written about this topic several years back
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/06/automate-the-hardening-of-your-virtual-machine-vmx-configurations.html
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/07/automatically-securing-virtual-machines-using-a-vcenter-alarm.html
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/07/automatically-securing-virtual-machines-using-vcenter-orchestrator.html
I would really like to see PowerActions used with VMware Orchestrator, if the two can be integrated then Orchestrator will be open a whole new possibilities.
It would also be nice to have PowerAction contextual menu under specific inventory objects.
What type of integration are you referring to?