Customize and format number output

[mazdajai]

How can  I can format the output to divide by a number?

For instance, often time the space displays as bytes, I always have to manually to divide them by 1024^3 to make it look friendly.

Example below...

Get-Datastore | Get-View | Select -ExpandProperty Summary | Select Name, Capacity, FreeSpace, @{N="Provisioned"; E={ ($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted) }}

[LucD]

Luckily PowerShell has some builtin constants that can help you.

You can use 1GB instead of 1024^3, like this

Get-Datastore | Get-View | 
Select -ExpandProperty Summary | 
Select Name, Capacity, FreeSpace, 
    @{N="Provisioned"; E={ ($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted)/1GB }}

And to format the number you can use the Round method

Like this

Get-Datastore | Get-View | 
Select -ExpandProperty Summary | 
Select Name, Capacity, FreeSpace, 
    @{N="Provisioned"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,1) }}

Or you can let the Format operator do the formatting, but remember that you will end up with a String, not a decimal number.

Get-Datastore | Get-View | 
Select -ExpandProperty Summary | 
Select Name, Capacity, FreeSpace, 
    @{N="Provisioned"; E={"{0:f1}" -f (($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted)/1GB) }}

[mazdajai]

Nice. But Capacity and FreeSpace still showing up the standard format, adding /1GB will only alter the entity..

[LucD]

Apparently I didn't understand your question correctly.

Could you give an example of what you actually want to see then ?

[mazdajai]

Sorry I will be specific. I don't have access to production at the moment, but here is an exmaple what I remember ...

Name               Capacity               FreeSpace     Provisioned
----                    --------                    ---------                    -----------
vlun05     1827880859          736885071          178387048
vlun01 781005859     246282578      714370728
vlun06 781005859         214952469      66929187

I used to copy them in to excel and divide them by 1024^3. You provided a solution and it formats the last column.

Name               Capacity               FreeSpace     Provisioned
----                    --------                    ---------                    -----------
vlun05     1827880859          736885071          1.78
vlun01 781005859     246282578      714.37
vlun06 781005859         214952469      669.29

Anyway I can format all the column?

Thanks!

[LucD]

Ok, I see.

You can use the same technique for the other 2 properties. Something like this

Get-Datastore | Get-View | 
Select -ExpandProperty Summary | 
Select Name,
    @{N="Capacity"; E={[Math]::Round($_.Capacity/1GB,1) }}, 
    @{N="FreeSpace"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.FreeSpace/1GB,1) }},
    @{N="Provisioned"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,1) }}

Another option is to use the New-VIProperty cmdlet and define these properties in GB.

See the Datastore section in my New-VIProperty module, where you find the New-VIProperty statements to provide the CapacityGB, FreeGB and ProvisionedGB properties.

[mazdajai]

Thanks!! Without the New-VIProperty, the code is messy. I am going to look into the new cmdlets.

Is there any book you can recommend for Powershell \ VMware PowerCLI?

[LucD]

I list several resources in the My PS library post

[mazdajai]

Thanks alot. That was helpful.

[mazdajai]

I expanded the code as the following:

@{N="Capacity"; E={[Math]::Round($_.Capacity/1GB,1) }},
@{N="Provisioned"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,1) }},
@{N="ProvFreeSpace"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.FreeSpace - $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,1) }},
@{N="FreeSpace"; E={[Math]::Round($_.FreeSpace/1GB,1) }}

but now it doesn't show the result in columns anymore, instead it is showing rows

Name          : lun17
Capacity      : 1999.8
Provisioned   : 1731.8
ProvFreeSpace : 268
FreeSpace     : 1296.3

Name          : lun07
Capacity      : 1871.8
Provisioned   : 1745.2
ProvFreeSpace : 126.5
FreeSpace     : 773.1

Name          : lun04
Capacity      : 1871.8
Provisioned   : 1854.4
ProvFreeSpace : 17.3
FreeSpace     : 724

Any idea how to make them in column again?

Is there anyway I can filter the result - for instance, show the luns only if they have 500+?

[Grzesiekk]

Hi there,

  try to put the |format-table -autosize at the end of what are you doing.

I think that when using more and more stuff in select, it automatically goes to the format-list mode because it can't fit in the columns.

You can force him to still show the table but : format-table

Just remeber that when viewing its ok to use format-table, but if you would to do something more with that after the format-table in pipe, like export-csv you have to omming the format-table as this will modify objects as well and transform then to other type than in select.

@{N="Capacity"; E={[Math]::Round($_.Capacity/1GB,1) }},

@{N="Capacity"; E={ if ([Math]::Round($_.Capacity/1GB,1)) -ge 500 {[Math]::Round($_.Capacity/1GB,1)}  }   },

if Capacity is greaterr or equal 500  put the capacity , if not "" will be put.

Greg

[LucD]

PowerShell tries to create the console output intelligently.

If you have to many properties selected, the PS engine will automatically switch to the Format-List type of output.

When you insist on Format-Table, the last column will be truncated.

You can also wrap the table output over moe than 1 line by using Format-Tabel -AutoSize -Wrap. It's probably not ideal for long list, but hey, it's still a table.

Have a look at Using Format Commands to Change Output View, it shows most of the available options.

I prefer to do the filtering, with a Where-clause, before the Select, that avoids useless calculations.

Somethin like this

Get-Datastore | Get-View | 
Select -ExpandProperty Summary | where {$_.Capacity -ge 500GB} | 
Select Name,
    @{N="Capacity"; E={[Math]::Round($_.Capacity/1GB,1) }}, 
    @{N="Provisioned"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,1)}},
    @{N="ProvFreeSpace"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.FreeSpace - $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,1) }},
    @{N="FreeSpace"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.FreeSpace/1GB,1)}}
    

[mazdajai]

Beautilful! I added another filter and the query takes about 7 seconds instead of the 1/2 second with "get-datastore *", Is there anyway I can optimize the query?

Get-Datastore sg*| Get-View |where {$_.Name -match "lun|template"} | Select -ExpandProperty Summary | Select Name,
    @{N="Capacity"; E={[Math]::Round($_.Capacity/1GB,0) }},
    @{N="Provisioned"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.Capacity - $_.FreeSpace + $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,0) }},
 @{N="ProvFreeSpace"; E={[Math]::Round(($_.FreeSpace - $_.Uncommitted)/1GB,0) }},
 @{N="FreeSpace"; E={[Math]::Round($_.FreeSpace/1GB,0) }}| Sort-Object ProvFreeSpace -descending|
 format-table -AutoSize -Wrap 

I noticed if the disks type are mix of thick /thin, the calculations for the provisioned would be off.

get-harddisk *template|select StorageFormat,persistence,disktype,CapacityKB|format-table
StorageFormat                   Persistence                      DiskType                    CapacityKB
 -------------                   -----------                      --------                    ----------
         Thick                    Persistent                          Flat                      41943040
          Thin                    Persistent                          Flat                      20971520
          Thin                    Persistent                          Flat                      26214400
          Thin                    Persistent                          Flat                      52428800

Name          Capacity Provisioned ProvFreeSpace FreeSpace
----          -------- ----------- ------------- ---------
 vtemplate      200         203            -3       140

[LucD]

You can replace

Get-Datastore sg*| Get-View |where {$_.Name -match "lun|template"}

with

Get-View -ViewType Datastore -Filter @{"Name"="^sg.*(lun)|(template)"}

That should make the query a bit faster