• How many times do you repeat a task before it should become a candidate for an effort around automating it?
• What is the risk involved in doing the task again manually after a period of time away from it?
• Is it more logical to ‘script’ the task and hand a simple standardised ‘tool’ over to colleagues than write a mini guide on how it’s done or show people individually?
• Can I simplify a task by hiding complexity that only an SME needs to understand in a tool that uses only widely understood and meaningful inputs?

Questions that will probably get different answers and views shared if you ask different people… which is why it’s nice when a community reduces the relevance of the questions by doing much of the work for you?  (I use ‘2 or 3’ as a rule for the first question providing I could see a need for the task to be done again btw)

If you have developed PowerShell skills then you can programme against many systems in the data centre.  Cisco UCS is included in this.  It has a library of cmdlets.  This library has been put to some awesome use in script submissions for a contest that is currently running on our Communities site.  A great resource has been created on the back of that competition.

Here is the main page for the contest.  Here is the script repository.

I particularly like the easy-on-the-eye bandwidth check that Vallard Benincosa has put together and the comprehensive system health check produced by Brandon Beck following great work by Jeremy Waldrop!  We’ve used the system health check in our labs and it’s very handy indeed!