One of the last (and sometimes most painful) steps in most deployment or upgrade projects is the documentation step. Producing usable, accurate documentation can be difficult but it is one of the most important steps in every technology project – the larger the environment, the more important the documentation.
VMware vSphere is one of the most powerful, efficient, secure and robust x86 server virtualization platforms available today. It allows the enterprise to consolidate server and desktop workloads while being highly available and maintaining the highest levels of security and scalability.
Announcing the VMware vSphere PowerShell Documentation Script!
In previous deployments of VMware products (and many other products, really), I had used a few tools to generate some form of documentation, but for the most part, the end customer deliverable was completed by hand.
Enter Carl Webster and his XenApp documentation script. All it required was the XenApp SDK and voila! A beautifully formatted Word document that outlined the entire XenApp farm – all by running a single PowerShell script.
All of my past scripting had been in VBScript, and I knew that times were changing and everything was going the way of PowerShell – change is difficult. I forced myself to try to learn a bit of PowerShell here and there, but didn’t quite have it down like I wanted to. I was looking for an opportunity to solidify my PowerShell knowledge and get away from that “archaic” VBScript – this is that opportunity.
Carl not only provided the ‘Webster Documentation Framework’ that this script uses but has been a HUGE help in getting this done – not to mention the several others that helped with the Framework itself. That being said, this script will be housed on carlwebster.com in the documentation scripts repository.
I will tell you that there is a TON of information, configuration, and settings found in vCenter, the hosts, datastores, networks, VMs…the list goes on. This documentation is what I and others feel are a good collection of settings that are important and need to be documented. I’m sure there are more – and if you’d like for them to be added to the script, just leave a comment!
Here’s What You Get
The following items are documented in the default run mode:
- vCenter Summary
- Cluster, host and datastore summary
- Basic vCenter Server settings
- DSN information
- SMTP settings
- Statistics levels
- Licensing
- Clusters
- HA configuration
- DRS configuration
- Hosts in the cluster
- Resource Polls
- Settings
- VMs in the resource pool
- Hosts
- Hardware configuration
- Key service status
- All items in the default run mode
- Host networking
- Adapter settings
- Standard vSwitching
- vSwitch settings
- VMs plugged in to the vSwitch
- Distributed vSwitching
- vSwitch settings
- VMs plugged in to the vSwitch
- Datastores
- Datastore settings
- Hosts connected to the datastore
- Virtual Machines
- VM settings
The Word output looks like this:
What You Need
- The script (available here)
- PowerShell v3 or higher
- PowerCLI v5.1 or higher (available here)
- vCenter Server 5.x (Windows or VSA)
- Microsoft Word for Word and PDF files
- Credentials with read access to all objects in vCenter
- Use the command line argument -VIServerName vCenterServerHere to specify your vCenter server – otherwise, the script will prompt for it
- If you are running the script with an account that has credentials to the vCenter server, you will not be prompted and PowerCLI will use your session credentials – otherwise the script will prompt for credentials
- If you run the script from a workstation and user account that has remote registry permissions to a Windows vCenter server, the DSN will be included in the report. The VSA does not have this capability currently.