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

Getting started


As an administrator, the desire is to produce reports on current system performance and configuration. Perhaps an audit of the drift of such systems is the typical use case that explains why PowerCLI has been downloaded in the first place. Most individuals start by downloading someone else's script and attempting to run it in the environment. This chapter deals with that—pinpointing safe and viable scripts to run within your environment.

Where do we begin?

One key tool that can be used to begin to understand the capabilities of scripting is RVTools (at www.robware.net), which provides a quick report of almost everything in the Virtual Environment. This truly is a fantastic example of what information can be garnished from a running vSphere/vCenter instance. It uses the proper Software Developers Kit (SDK) and the .NET framework to pull the information into a CSV file.

A PoSH-centric file named vCheck, originally started by the author of www.virtual.net, Alan Renouf, has blossomed...