Format Issues Exporting from PowerCLI to dr-ip-customizer

Just a quick post.

I have a large of PowerCLI functions/cmdlets for SRM that I heavily modified from Ben Meadowcraft.

One of the functions/cmdlets that I was working on was a function called Export-VMNetworking.

The output of this function was a CSV file tha could be used as the input to the dr-ip-customizer (I’m trying to mass input IPs).

At first I was doing the following:

The output looked a little funny though, every field was double-quoted:

“VM ID”,”VM Name”,”vCenter Server”,”Adapter ID”,”DNS Domain”,”Net BIOS”,”Primary WINS”,”Secondary WINS”,”IP Address”,”Subnet Mask”,”Gateway(s)”,”IPv6 Address”,”IPv6 Subnet Prefix length”,”IPv6 Gateway(s)”,”DNS Server(s)”,”DNS Suffix(es)”

When I tried to use this as input to dr-ip-customizer, I received this error:

ERROR: Error on line number ‘2’: The Adapter ID field is invalid.

So I figured I need to get rid of the quotes. No problem right?

Instead of using export-csv, I’m using converto-csv, piping that to replace which swaps out the double-quotes, and then out to a file.

When I tried this file I got a panic!

2015-01-28T15:05:24.773-08:00 [04440 panic ‘Default’] –>
–> Panic: Win32 invalid_parameter error
–> Backtrace:
–> backtrace[00] rip 000007fef60ba04a
–> backtrace[01] rip 000007fef5f7f51f
–> backtrace[02] rip 000007fef5f806be
–> backtrace[03] rip 000007fef60d172c
–> backtrace[04] rip 000007fef60d188c
–> backtrace[05] rip 000007fef60c9723
–> backtrace[06] rip 0000000072c652ad
–> backtrace[07] rip 0000000072c65309
–> backtrace[08] rip 00000001400274d2
–> backtrace[09] rip 0000000140051d6f
–> backtrace[10] rip 000000014005e025
–> backtrace[11] rip 000000014005f0e9
–> backtrace[12] rip 000000014005f50e
–> backtrace[13] rip 00000000774659ed
–> backtrace[14] rip 000000007759c541
–>
2015-01-28T15:05:24.789-08:00 [04440 panic ‘Default’] (Log recursion level 2) Wi
n32 invalid_parameter error

—— In-memory logs start ——–
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘Default’] Section for VMware Wor
kstation, pid=4988, version=e.x.p, build=1964825, option=Release
mem> –>
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘Default’] Logging uses fast path
: true
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘Default’] Handling bora/lib logs
with VmaCore facilities
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘Default’] Initialized channel ma
nager
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘Default’] Current working direct
ory: E:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager\bin
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 verbose ‘Default’] Setting COM threadi
ng model to MTA
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘Default’] ThreadPool windowsStac
kImmediateCommit = true
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘ThreadPool’] Thread pool on asio
: Min Io, Max Io, Min Task, Max Task, Max Concurency: 2, 401, 2, 200, 2147483647

mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [03716 info ‘ThreadPool’] Thread enlisted
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘ThreadPool’] Thread enlisted
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [03496 info ‘ThreadPool’] Thread enlisted
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [03280 info ‘ThreadPool’] Thread enlisted
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [02648 info ‘ThreadPool’] Thread enlisted
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 info ‘Default’] Vmacore::InitSSL: hand
shakeTimeoutUs = 120000000
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.711-08:00 [04440 error ‘Default’] Win32 invalid_paramet
er: expression=(null), function=(null), file=(null), line=0
mem> 2015-01-28T15:05:24.789-08:00 [04440 panic ‘Default’] (Log recursion level
2) Win32 invalid_parameter error

—— In-memory logs end ——–
2015-01-28T15:05:24.789-08:00 [04440 panic ‘Default’] Section for VMware Worksta
tion, pid=4988, version=e.x.p, build=1964825, option=Release
–>

Didn’t really like that at all

Next thing I tried was to send the example csv (which worked fine) and my csv to a linux machine to look for weird chars.

In VIM, I used the :set command against the two files:

 

 

The example file generated by dr-ip-customizer was in the format utf-8

The file I created in PowerCLI was in the format utf-16le

I went to PowerClI and added the -encoding flag:

 

After that change, the file generated is also utf-8. I did check the original file (with the double-quotes) and that was utf-8. I believe the -replace operation converted the encoding to utf-16le.

I hope this helps someone save some time in the future. The PowerCLi functions I have are kind of all over the place (expanded a lot of Ben’s functions to various values for easier reporting) so I’m not sure I’ll release them, but feel free to ping me if you are interested. I haven’t touched any of the new functionality in PowerCLI 5.8/SRM 5.8 yet though.