The diary of Shogan

Hello PowerCLI

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So today is the first time I am trying out PowerCLI for vSphere. Yes, I know I am late to the game in the VMware scene, but I hope to start learning more about PowerCLI and start automating some tasks that are currently being done manually where I work.

 

Here is my first try at connecting to my lab vCenter server 🙂

 

Pretty simple really, just as the banner text says, use:
Connect-VIServer servername and
Get-VM

to connect and get a list of VMs. I guess this is my “Hello World” start out with PowerCLI then. If anyone has any tips or quick and easy cmdlets to run in PowerCLI to get information back, please drop a comment with them below. I would also love to know how to iterate through a list of VMs and check whether they have snapshots or not! That would be a great start to what I am looking to achieve.

Cheers!

Now reading: Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide

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I was recently offered a copy of Pablo Ruiz’s “Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide” eBook to read through and provide comments / feedback on – needless to say I was quite excited to get stuck in, however I am still on holiday in South Africa so for now I am just downloading the eBook and will save it for when I am back in the UK.

I actually can’t wait to have a read through. cocos2d is by far the most fun I have had programming with, and I’m sure this book will be a valuable asset.

You can grab a copy over at PacketPub if you are interested in learning about programming with (imo) the best 2D gaming engine for iOS. At the moment it is going on special for around £25.00 which is not bad at all for a guide encompassing a lot of what cocos2d has to offer.

Sneak peek: New game in development for iPhone / iPod Touch

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So I thought I would do a post where I can post updates as I make progress on this new game I am developing. The platform is of course the iPhone / iPod touch. That is all versions from the first iPhones up to the new iPhone 4. I may even do an iPad version later. I have really been putting some effort into learning more about OpenGL and more specifically the cocos2d engine. By starting this game I have learnt tons about particle effects, sprites and game logic. I am even having to dust out the cobwebs in my brain when it comes to mathematics! The shooting and accelerometer movement algorithms in this game took some effort to get right! Note that all graphics and code are original and done myself (i.e. all game content is self-made!) My graphic design abilities have definitely helped with regard to the making of my ship, enemy, back drop and other game graphics. I’ll post further updates as I go along. The name is going to stay secret till its released though 🙂

This is a top-down, accelerometer controlled space shooter, with fluid 60fps animation and great effects. Anyway, here are a few screenshots of what I have so far. Note that any text you see is not final and just there for testing purposes for now. The enemy ship and player graphics are also going to be refined before I submit this.

Note the Battlestar reference in my last screenshot 😀 Anyway, if you have any ideas or questions, feel free to post them below.

An update on what I have been busy with lately…

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Thought I would do a quick blog post on what I have been busy with lately.

1. My first iPhone / iPod Touch game (released on Cydia for Jailbroken devices)

So this is something I have been busy with over the last few months – coding bits and pieces here and there whenever I get a bit of spare time on my hands. Its nothing special – just a simple Maze game. You use your device’s accelerometer to navigate your character through 5 maze levels. If you touch the walls you lose health. The longer you take to complete the maze, the more score you lose too. So the point is to get through in the quickest possible time without touching walls. I learnt the basics of how to work with the accelerometer, game loops, twitter integration, a little bit of PHP and mySQL for the Highscore system and a fair amount of general objectiveC code. There are a couple of bugs in the game at the moment (like the way you get a little stuck on walls – issue with my game loop) that I don’t really have time to sort out at the moment. But hopefully I’ll get more time in the near future to figure out my mistakes and fix these. You can check the game out in more detail here or you can download it for Jailbroken Apple devices on Cydia. Search for “Speed Maze”.

2. Moving

Well we’re moving house in the next month or so. We have found a place a little closer in to London that is going to offer far more room, an awesome garden, park across the road, and to top it all off, its in a nice quiet cal-de-sac. As such, I have been taking the opportunity to eBay some surpluss hardware and gadgets I have had lying around for a while. This includes various PCs and bits of hardware I have had lying around, plus around 20U worth of Dell PowerEdge servers! (See image above).

3. Other

My home VMware lab – I have also been building various ESX and vCenter labs here at home to play with in a non-production environment. This is great as it allows me to test all kinds of crazy things I really don’t want to try out at work! I have chopped and changed the hardware, but finally have two different labs going. One is a nested set up of virtualized ESX 4.0 hosts, running under a main ESX 4.0 host if you see what I mean.  The other is running on a PowerEdge 6850 server at the moment – 4 x Xeon 3.16GHz CPUs and 4GB RAM. The issue I have here is that there is no Intel VT (hardware virtualization) support on these processors. So although ESX 4.0 runs OK, I can only run 32-bit VMs for now. Exchange 2010 and other 64-bit VMs will have to stay on my main gaming PC for now then. I also found this great WordPress plugin by lynxbat on Twitter. Once set up, it displays statistics from your VMware ESX host or vCenter Server. You can take a look at my current lab stats on the right in the sidebar. Get the plugin over here: WP-vSphereStats. Apart from that, we have also been planning one or two soon to be taken, well deserved holidays. We’ll be off to France soon, after which we’ll be taking a nice long holiday in South Africa. Excited to see friends and family again soon!

Accessing network equipment via console cable from your ESX / linux server

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Ever wondered how you can access your Cisco router, switch, or other network device over console cable from your ESX host / other linux machine? Obviously you’ll need a COM port on the physical hardware to start… Here’s a guide I wrote for SysAdmin-Talk. Have a read if you are interested in finding out how to achieve this. They have some other great articles and how-to’s posted up there. I have already found some extremely useful Exchange how-tos and guides and am looking forward to writing more for SysAdmin Talk!

SysAdmin Talk – Don’t Tear your Hair Out over Access to Cisco Devices