Month: October 2008

So I basically haven’t slept in two weeks. I thought it would be a good idea to pick up the torch, and contribute on the NetApp Ontap SDK to PowerShell. I’m sure you’ve seen the Codeplex project by now if not here. I have a couple of personal issues with this first swing, and initially I set out to help. Two weeks later I have completely rewrote the whole cha-bang. I’m not a dev, and I don’t pretend to know as much as Adam. I am however an Administrator who uses PowerShell and NetApp’s every day. From that perspective I’m writing what I need the cmdlets to do. Very quickly I ran into a style issue… My question to the mob is simple of the three examples below, what would be your preference?

[1]PS > Get-NaDisk –disk v0.20| Fail-NaDisk –force

[2]PS > (Get-NaDisk –disk v0.20).FailDisk()

[3]PS > Get-NaDisk –disk v0.20 | set-NaDisk –Fail -confirm:$false

What do you think? One is the most intuitive, but will lead to over 500 cmdlets! Option two is the least intuitive, but would produce the tightest code. Finally option 3 per the PowerShell team documentation option 3 is the “correct way of doing it”…  I wan’t to use option 1 but It requires the use of an illegal unaproved verb “Fail”.

Help…

~Glenn

UPDATE: My basis for not using Fail-NaDisk. Although, I believe that Fail-NaDisk is more in line with the spirit of powershell.

We’ve been having some strange issues at work with our email archive solution. The “fix” from the vendor, was to install some software on all of our backend exchange servers…. Yeah that’s how I felt about it as well. Being the kind of change that you must test it was time to set up a lab. I grabbed my white board and wrote down what was needed.

1 Domain Controller
3 Exchange Servers
2 SQL servers
2 WIN2K (email archive)

Without really even thinking about it I opened PowerShell, and went about getting this done. Four commands and 1hr later we were installing exchange!

[28]PS>Get-VirtualSwitch -VMHost (Get-VMHost esx15) -Name DEV04 | New-VirtualPortGroup -name "192.168.232.0" -VLanId 900

[29]PS>$folder = New-Folder -name DEV04 -Location (Get-Folder vm)

[36]PS>1..8 | % { New-VM -Name “EMAILDEV$($_)” -ResourcePool (get-ResourcePool ADMIN_DEV) -Location $folder -Template (get-template WIN2K3_ENT_x86) -OSCustomizationSpec (Get-OSCustomizationSpec WIN2K3_ENT_x86)
-datastore (get-datastore vmdata0) -VMHost (get-vmhost esx15) -RunAsync }

[263]PS>Get-Folder DEV04 | get-vm | Get-NetworkAdapter | Set-NetworkAdapter -NetworkName “192.168.232.0”

A couple of things to note it took 4 or 5 -whatif attempts to get the new-VM cmd right, and the hour was waiting for the vm’s to deploy.  I know that there is nothing new here, but I often see too many “case studies” with powershell… they overcomplicate things.

yesterday I solved a problem with Powershell.  I didn’t write a script.  I didn’t need v2 remoting.   Just four very simple yet incredibly powerful commands…    Give it a try some time just open posh, and TRY to solve a problem… I’ll admit that it is daunting at first, but after a while the reward is ten fold.

~Glenn

P.S. Did I mention that the VI Toolkit is friggin amazing!