Uncategorized Archives - The Practical Administrator

Within the PowerShell community there has been a lingering debate over modules and providers. Initially everyone seemed compelled to do both. Personally, I’ve never been very impressed by third party providers. Mainly because they always felt like a gimmick. They forced the file system analog, and the results where not very good. They were buggy, slow, and didn’ t support the standard provider hooks. This lead to many vendors never bothering, and focused instead on cmdlets. I myself had come to the conclusion that providers where something for the PowerShell team, and third party ISV should just leave them alone. Fortunately the provider in version 1.3 of the DataONTAP PowerShell toolkit has broken the mold and renewed my faith in providers!

I’m currently winding down on a datacenter build that has consumed me for the better part of six months. Last night our team went through and stood up vSphere on 200+ hosts. I know that’s nothing for you cloud providers, but that’s a lot of servers for the average IT shop. Being a lights out datacenter we have 3 management paths to every server IP-KVM, ILOM, and serial ports. Going through and setting all that up would have been a pain in the but, so I did a little searching and found how to configure the SUN ILOM via the serial port. With that document and little experimentation I quickly had my script, now all that was left was to learn how to script via a COM port. I turned to BING and found this article which pointed me to a new-to-me .Net Class… about 4hrs later I had a complete solution, and yet another example of the Admin Development Model.

PowerShell: NetApp DataONTAP Toolkit v1.3 A PSProvider done right!

PowerShell: Automate SUN ILOM configuration