Pushing Host Profiles via PowerCLI.

Nice.. I had to push a host profile to a whole number of hosts, but they were all running a lot of VM's. Anyone who's seen vSphere knows that via the interface, you need to set a server in maintenance mode, apply the host profile, then take it out of maintenance mode. This is fine for one or two machines, but by the time you get to the 5th or 6th server, you get a bit bored, especially when you know you've got 20 to do.. So in comes Powershell (I should say PowerCLI) again, to save me some time.. I thought.

First things first: Figure out how to get a host profile:

$MyHostProfile = Get-VMHostProfile -Name "coolprofile"

Fail. Fail? Yes, fail. Somehow I run into a wall, with PowerCLI telling me that my profile can't be found. Some googling tells me that there's a bug in PowerCLI, but there's a workaround:

Get-VMHostProfile -Entity *

Woohoo! It shows me a hostprofile that was already pushed to the client before. So my statement would now become:

$MyHostProfile = Get-VMHostProfile -Entity * 

Note that this workaround would only work with one host profile. I'll figure out how to get a specific hostprofile implemented some day, but I've got one, so I got lucky (this time).

Now to apply a host profile to an esxhost:

Apply-VMHostProfile -Entity $esxhost -Profile $MyHostProfile -Confirm:$false

Damn, that was easy. Especially since the first part was so difficult..OK, now now to get a host in maintenance mode: 

Set-VMHost -VMHost $esxhost -State maintenance 

Great, that works! Now how do I get it out? 

Set-VMHost -VMHost $esxhost -State connected 


Cool, works too! Now I have to put the whole thing together:

$hosts = "esx1","esx2","esx5","esx6"
$MyHostProfile = Get-VMHostProfile -Entity *
foreach ($esxhost in $hosts) {
Set-VMHost -VMHost $esxhost -State maintenance
Apply-VMHostProfile -Entity $esxhost -Profile $MyHostProfile -Confirm:$false
Set-VMHost -VMHost $esxhost -State connected
}


As you can see, I used an array of hosts in this case (the first line of code. Didn't want all hosts in my case) but I could have changed that to all hosts by just doing a get-vmhost.

Running this now puts each host in maintenance mode, applies the host profile, and takes it out again.. Now imagine that for 20, 30 or even 100 hosts...... Yes, I *like* PowerCLI...