Category: Api

So today PowerCLI 11.4 was released with the following updates:

• Add support for Horizon View 7.9
• Added new cmdlets to the Storage module
• Updated Storage module cmdlets
• Updated HCX module cmdlets

As usual we need to wait for API explorer to be updated before we get the exact changes to the api’s but I already grabbed s short list by comparing the methods. Later I will create a more elaborate blog post about the changes if I have an overview. What I do see are some new additions that might be added to the vCheck for Horizon.

Also: even though the updates are for Horizon 7.9 there’s a good chance that a lot of this also works for previous versions, the examples below where done with 7.8.

• Datacenter
• DesktopHealth
• Gateway
• GatewayHealth
• MessageClient
• Monitoring
• PersistentDiskQueryService
• Privilege
• SecondaryCredentials
• SessionStatistics
• StorageAccelerator
• UsageStatistics
• Validator
• VirtualCenterStatistics

Sadly it’s late so I can only show a couple of examples:

$services.Privilege.Privilege_ListSelectablePrivileges()

$services.SessionStatistics.SessionStatistics_GetLocalSessionStatistics()

Finally we can reset the usage counters as well now

And some statistics from vCenter

($services.VirtualCenterStatistics.VirtualCenterStatistics_listSummaryStatistics())
($services.VirtualCenterStatistics.VirtualCenterStatistics_listSummaryStatistics()).DataStoreSummaryStatistics

One of my customers asked the question if it is possible to get a quick sessioncount for a script that they can run very often for a correct logging of license usage. While this could easily be done by grabbing all the sessions I thought this could be a slow process. I remembered though that the first release of the vmware.hv.helper module had a function called get-podsessions that only returned a sessioncount. I decided to see what was used for this. By going back in time at github I found that the GlobalSessionQueryService was still used but with the GlobalSessionQueryService_GetCountWithSpec method. It needs the service and a spec of the type VMware.Hv.GlobalSessionQueryServiceCountSpec.

the spec itself can hold one of the many options to get a count for

As you can see there is a globalentitlement property that needs to be set using the id so let’s grab that one first.

$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryEntityType = 'GlobalEntitlementSummaryView'
$globalentitlements = ($queryService.QueryService_Create($Services1, $defn)).results

I will use the first globalentitlement to grab the sessioncount

$globalentitlement=$globalentitlements | select -first 1
$globalsessionqueryservice_helper = New-Object VMware.Hv.GlobalSessionQueryServiceService  
$count_spec = New-Object VMware.Hv.GlobalSessionQueryServiceCountSpec  
$count_spec.globalentitlement=$globalentitlement.id
$sessioncountperglobalentitlements=$globalsessionqueryservice_helper.GlobalSessionQueryService_GetCountWithSpec($services1,$count_spec)

As you can see we actually get a count per pod so to get all the counts from all pods from all globalentitlements I have created a script with a couple foreach’s.

$hvserver1=connect-hvserver SERVERNAME
$services1=$hvserver1.extensiondata
$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryEntityType = 'GlobalEntitlementSummaryView'
$globalentitlements = ($queryService.QueryService_Create($Services1, $defn)).results
$queryservice.QueryService_DeleteAll($services1)
$sessioncount=@()


foreach ($globalentitlement in $globalentitlements){
  $globalsessionqueryservice_helper = New-Object VMware.Hv.GlobalSessionQueryServiceService  
  $count_spec = New-Object VMware.Hv.GlobalSessionQueryServiceCountSpec  
  $count_spec.globalentitlement=$globalentitlement.id
  $sessioncountperglobalentitlements=$globalsessionqueryservice_helper.GlobalSessionQueryService_GetCountWithSpec($services1,$count_spec)
  foreach ($sessioncountperglobalentitlement in $sessioncountperglobalentitlements){
    $pod=$services1.pod.pod_get($sessioncountperglobalentitlement.id)
    $sessioncount+= New-Object PSObject -Property @{
      "Global_Entitlement_Name" = $globalentitlement.base.displayname;
      "Pod_Name"=$pod.displayname
      "Pod_Sessioncount" = ($sessioncountperglobalentitlement | select-object -expandproperty count);
      "Site_Name"= ($services1.site.site_get($pod.site)).base.Displayname;
    }
  }
}
 return $sessioncount | select-object Global_Entitlement_Name,Pod_Name,Site_Name,Pod_Sessioncount

The W10_MGMT global entitlement only has a pool in pod1 so even though the pod doesn’t have a pool inside the global entitlement it will still return a sessioncount.

Performance

I also decided to time it but in my small environment it took 3 seconds and 3 of those where for connecting to the connection server. If I removed the connecting part it was 0.7 seconds.

Measure-Command {D:\scripts\dev\session_count.ps1}

Back at the customer I decided to compare this against dumping all global sessions, this will give some better data since it has a couple more sessions in it (around 3500 at the moment of testing)

The script I used for getting all global sessions is the code that I used for the get-hvglobalsession in the vmware.hv.helper module

$query_service_helper = New-Object VMware.Hv.GlobalSessionQueryServiceService
$query=new-object vmware.hv.GlobalSessionQueryServiceQuerySpec

$SessionList = @()
foreach ($pod in $services1.Pod.Pod_List()) {
  $query.pod=$pod.id
  $queryResults = $query_service_helper.GlobalSessionQueryService_QueryWithSpec($services1, $query)
  $GetNext = $false
  do {
    if ($GetNext) { $queryResults = $query_service_helper.GlobalSessionQueryService_GetNext($services1, $queryResults.id) }
    $SessionList += $queryResults.results
    $GetNext = $true
  } while ($queryResults.remainingCount -gt 0)
    $query_service_helper.GlobalSessionQueryService_Delete($services1, $queryresults.id)

}
return $sessionlist

Screenshots from the timing:

so the getcountwithspec method is about 2.5 seconds faster but the data in the globalsession is way more extensive and usable for all kinds of management overviews.