MVP Monday - Hyper-V Blitz (hv_blitz) Inventory Tool

Editor’s Note: In partnership with Microsoft Press, MVPs have been contributing to an ongoing guest series on their official team blog based on monthly themes. This month’s theme is Windows Server 2012. Today’s article is from Virtualization MVP Nathan Lasnoski which is the 17th in the series .

 

 

Hyper-V Blitz (hv_blitz) Inventory Tool

Nathan here. A key aspect of Microsoft’s private cloud strategy is enabling standardization and automation. The extensive presence of PowerShell throughout Windows Server 2012 represents Microsoft’s commitment to these goals. The PowerShell capabilities can be used for both retrieval of data and the instantiation of action. These two capability sets provide the administrator both a comfortable user experience and a platform for technology automation.

I believe that community involvement is the answer to creating great tools. In an effort to move the community toward a collaborative goal, I’ve created a PowerShell script called “hv_blitz”. This bears relation in name and intended function to the great “sp_blitz”. The goal of hv_blitz is to gather Hyper-V host inventory and output it either to CSV or to the console in a method as fast as possible. I’ve found that this tool is very useful as a consultant because it requires no infrastructure and is fast to run. Read full article and see hv_blitz script here

 

About the author:

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Nathan Lasnoski is a Microsoft MVP for virtualization communities and Concurrency's infrastructure practice lead. Nathan is a respected infrastructure architect in the Microsoft community, whose 10 years of consulting experience brings a practical and strategic approach to infrastructure design, grounded in best practice frameworks and techniques. As a dynamic speaker and presenter, Nathan frequently gives workshops and Microsoft sponsored events, as well as participates in Rapid Deployment Programs at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. He is an accomplished infrastructure architect with hundreds of successful projects, bringing substantial experience and a pragmatic approach to each project. Follow Nathan on Twitter.

About MVP Monday

The MVP Monday Series is created by Melissa Travers. In this series we work to provide readers with a guest post from an MVP every Monday. Melissa is a Community Program Manager, formerly known as MVP Lead,  for Messaging and Collaboration (Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and SharePoint) and Microsoft Dynamics in the US. She began her career at Microsoft as an Exchange Support Engineer and has been working with the technical community in some capacity for almost a decade.  In her spare time she enjoys going to the gym, shopping for handbags, watching period and fantasy dramas, and spending time with her children and miniature Dachshund.  Melissa lives in North Carolina and works out of the Microsoft Charlotte office.