Emptying a VMFS datastore with PowerCLI

Well, once again I hacked at the Powershell/PowerCLI the other day. Since we don’t yet have a Enterprise Plus license at work (which would support Datastore Maintaince and Storage DRS), I needed a way to empty one datastore and move all the content into another one, while enabling Thin-Provisioning.

So I googled for a bit, and actually found a few hints … So without further yada-yada, here’s the script I came up with:

Initially I have something different, which was a bit shorter (based on Brian‘s work), but it had a huge downside: If you have vRDMs (like I do), it converts every damn vRDM into a VMDK, so make sure you only run this script on a datastore on VMs that either have only pRDMs or VMs with only VMDKs.

Doing TSM’s job on Windows Server 2008

Ran into another weird problem the other day … Had a few Windows boxens running out of space. Why ? Well, because TSM includes a System-State backup when creating the daily incremental. Now, apparently (as stated by the IBM support) it isn’t TSM’s job to keep track of the VSS snapshots but rather Windows’. Now by default, if you don’t click on the VSS properties of a Windows drive, there is no limit on the volume. Thus, VSS is slowly eating up all your space.

That isn’t the worst of it, but when you want to delete it all … With Windows 2003 you would just this:

However, as with everything Microsoft, Windows 2008 R2 does it a little bit different. As a matter of fact, it won’t allow you to delete application triggered snapshots (as you can see in the example below), so you’re basically shit-out-of-luck.

Well, not really … diskshadow to the rescue. Simply running diskshadow with a simple script like this:

Just for clarification this isn’t my own work, it was someone elses.