VMUG UserCon 2018 - Documenting Your Virtual Infrastructure with PowerShell & PowerCLI

Transcript

1. Documenting your Virtual Infrastructure with PowerShell
2. Tim Carman Senior Consulting Engineer Thomas Duryea Logicalis @tpcarman github.com/tpcarman timcarman.net
3. My Problem The constant need to deliver As Built documentation for multiple technologies for every customer project
4. My Objective To automate the creation of As Built documentation in formats which are clear and consistent, using a process which is simple to build and manage
5. My Inspiration RVTools, vCheck, vDocumentation Fantastic tools which provide a significant amount of information however they only report on VMware vSphere environments and do not report on other related infrastructure. Jake Rutski’s vSphere Documentation Script A fantastic concept, which provided a lot of great information, however it required MS Word and I regularly had issues with output formatting. I also found it quite complex to tailor to my requirements. Build It Myself Limited PowerShell skills. Any document framework I could produce would take significant time and effort to learn, produce and maintain. Some existing PS modules were useful but each had their limitations.
6. My Solution PScribo (pronounced 'skree-bo') is a PowerShell module which is used to create a document in a standardised format. The document can be exported into various formats by "plugins", for example, text, HTML, XML and/or Microsoft Word format.
7. ❑ Open Source Project – github.com/iainbrighton/PScribo ❑ Supports multiple formats: Word, HTML, XML & Text ❑ It does not require MS Word to produce documents ❑ Available via PS Gallery module or GitHub bundle ❑ YouTube Demo - https://youtu.be/pNIC70bjBZE ❑ Iain started the project to assist Carl Webster with his projects PScribo by Iain Brighton (@iainbrighton)
8. My Demo
9. ❑ The vSphere As Built and other scripts are still in development. What you see today may or may not end up in the v1.0 release. ❑ I would consider my PowerShell skills to be intermediate at best. There are likely to be many examples of bad coding. ❑ My Git skills are worse ❑ I use VScode - Tabs vs Spaces is now irrelevant My Disclaimer
10. ❑ I would like your feedback and contributions ❑ Develop report types (Summary, Detailed, Complete) ❑ Add Email capabilities, Theme/Style support, Config files ❑ Template the documentation script ❑ Add scripts to PS Gallery ❑ Add multi vCenter Support (vSphere) ❑ Add more health checks, more details, more vendors My Next Steps
11. Thank You Questions? @tpcarman github.com/tpcarman timcarman.net