Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By : Chris Halverson
Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By: Chris Halverson

Overview of this book

Have you ever wished you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your VMware environments in exactly the format you want? Or that you could automate a crucial task that needs to be performed on a regular basis? Powerful Command Line Interface (PowerCLI) scripts do all these things and much more for VMware environments. PowerCLI is a command-line interface tool used to automate VMware vSphere environments. It is used to handle complicated administration tasks through use of various cmdlets and scripts, which are designed to handle certain aspects of VSphere servers and to help you manage them. This book will show you the intricacies of PowerCLI through real-life examples so that you can discover the art of PowerCLI scripting. At the start, you will be taught to download and install PowerCLI and will learn about the different versions of it. Moving further, you will be introduced to the GUI of PowerCLI and will find out how to develop single line scripts to duplicate running tasks, produce simple reports, and simplify administration. Next, you will learn about the methods available to get information remotely. Towards the end, you will be taught to set up orchestrator and build workflows in PowerShell with update manager and SRM scripts.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
PowerCLI Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Orchestrating with Orchestrator


After the last chapter where vRO was installed, the next point is to configure and run Orchestrator. We left off at the Welcome, Username, and Run sections of the product. In the left pane, there are five icons that perform certain actions, explained as follows:

  • The Home tab is the starting place of the Orchestrator client. It allows the running of previously run scripts, gives a view of running policies or workflows, and scheduled task list, and gives a link for getting more plugins and packages. There is more, but it is irrelevant until there is more knowledge of the system.

  • The second tab is Scheduler; it displays scheduled workflows that are running. At this point, there isn't anything to see in this tab.

  • The third tab is Policies, which will be described later in this section.

  • The fourth tab is interesting for a beginner to this tool. It is Workflows. This is the tab where the majority of users will spend more time in.

  • The last tab is Inventory, which shows...