Get-PowerShell Andy Schneider's Blog about Windows PowerShell

Last Friday, NetApp released version 1.4 of their PowerShell Toolkit. They have a total of 501 Cmdlets with this release.

Their stuff just keeps getting better and better.

There are a couple of Cmdlets that I wanted to highlight because they were extremely useful for me the other day. We have several 8 to 10 node Hyper-V Clusters all using NetApp and iSCSI storage. We have been moving VM’s to faster disks on our NetApp. One challenge that can crop up is correlating which VM’s in HyperV are stored on which Volume or QTree on our NetApp.

We have a great Ops guy who is super nitpicky about naming standards and because of our naming standards, we know exactly how everything lines up, at least for the VM’s that have been created in the last year or so. The problem is some legacy VM’s that don’t adhere to our standards in development and test environments. This is where Get-NaHyperV comes in to save the day. This CmdLet has actually been around for a while, but with this release, it now supports clustered disks, which is exactly what we needed. In addition to getting info on our CSV’s and exact location of VHD’d, we were also able to enumerate exactly which NetApp Volume, QTree, and LUN the VM Disk resources were associated with. Absolutely brilliant!

Here’s a screenshot of an example from the NetApp Help on the cmdlet

There is also a more generic cmdlet call Get-NaHostDisk which does essentially the same thing for disks that are on the SAN but not necessarily associated with Hyper-V VM’s. This can be used for clustered SQL or something else that uses shared storage.

I use these cmdlets nearly everyday. I can’t tell you how much they have streamlined our processes and tooling for working with our storage on a daily basis.  NetApp, keep up the good work!

I was at the PowerShell Deep Dive the first half of this week. During a break, I had the chance to meet Clinton Knight, the lead guy behind the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit. Since v1, I have been asking for a provider. Well it turns out that they slipped one in in their latest release and I didn’t even notice. That will teach me to start reading release notes.

Anyway, now with a filer you can do things like the following. This is going to make it even easier now to navigate all your volumes, q-trees, and LUN’s.

Another very cool feature that I just found out about as well is the ability to store credentials to connect to different filers. They have three cmdlets that allow you to Get, Add, and remove credentials.These are encrypted and stored on disk so that only the user that created them can access them. Definitely a nice touch.

NetApp has really done a fantastic job with their Cmdlets. Their implementation of PowerShell is by far one of the best I have seen, including Microsoft and third parties. Companies looking to use PowerShell in their products should definitely take a look at what NetApp has done.