Category: PowerCLI

I should’ve already posted a blog about this but better late then never. At the end of february I posted about several new functions being added to the vmware.hv.helper and two out of three where about pulling session information. Recently I received some questions about using those since it’s the raw data being returned. For my Dutch vmug presentation I used several gif’s that showed what you can do with that data. I might need to update the cmdlets so all information will be shown at once but that’s for another time since it might slow down the cmdlet a lot and I don’t like that.

Usage

Since get-hvglobalsession and get-hvlocalsession show almost similar data I will only show the latter one.

get-hvglocalsession

As you see this only shows the methods contained inside the session. We can show the content by pipelining it to  select-object -expandproperty but I prefer the bracket method since these might go several layers deep.

(get-hvlocalsession).namesdata

Some of the returned values are logical like the username, machineorrdsservername. The desktop name though is the actual desktop pool the user is connected to. Desktoptype can be Automated, Manual or RDS depending on the type of desktop and Desktopsource can be Virtual_Center (VM’s hosted on vCenter but not managed by Horizon or Full Clone desktops), View_Composer(when using Linked Clones), Instant_Clone_engine (when using Instant Clones), Unmanaged (physical machines, non-vCenter vm’s) or RDS (Terminal Servers). Farmname will be used when it’s an RDS session. The Securitygateway will show the Connection Server the user connected to or the UAG/Security server used.

the same can be done with referencedata and sessiondata

(get-hvlocalsession).referencedata
(get-hvlocalsession).sessiondata

Not a lot of directly usefull information but a bunch of id’s that you might be able to use with the api’s if needed.

A lot of information about the session itself.

The actual code

The get-hvglobalsession actually is a query repeated for all pods. First it connects to the query service and then creates a query to run against each pod and add that to a sessionlist.

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

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

}
return $sessionlist
} 

The get-hvlocalsession is almost the same, it just doesn’t need to foreach since it doesn’t have multiple pods to query.

 $query_service_helper = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
  $query = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition

  $query.queryEntityType = 'SessionLocalSummaryView'
  $SessionList = @()
  $GetNext = $false
  $queryResults = $query_service_helper.QueryService_Create($services, $query)
  do {
    if ($GetNext) { $queryResults = $query_service_helper.QueryService_GetNext($services, $queryResults.id) }
    $SessionList += $queryResults.results
    $GetNext = $true
  } 
  while ($queryResults.remainingCount -gt 0)
    $query_service_helper.QueryService_Delete($services, $queryResults.id)
  

  return $sessionlist
  [System.gc]::collect()
} 

In both there is a do while because otherwise it will run into some restrictions about maximum amount of data to return.