In the last nine years that I've been with VMware India, I have had the privilege of hearing from several CIOs and heads of infrastructure that VMware is an industry innovator and leader, creating amazing products that are disrupting and evolving businesses and the personal lives of many of us. I consider myself extremely lucky to be leading one of the best technical teams in the IT infrastructure space today.
When one of these technical brains in my team, Sajal Debnath, who comes from a small village in West Bengal, told me that he is writing a book on Mastering PowerCLI, the first question I asked him was "Why scripting?". I asked this question because scripting is a popular and great way to make up for a product's shortcomings or missing features, and it can be a real-time saver for administrators. But, to the best of my knowledge, every new release of VMware's products tends to have several features or enhancements that have been requested by our customers.
Sajal told me that the reason he has been successful in meeting the demanding needs of his customers is his expertise in scripting. PowerCLI is a very powerful command-line tool that allows you to automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS, and more. There are unimaginable things that you can do in a VMware environment, and it is impossible for any product to include all of these features. I've heard from some of my customers too that tasks, such as automatically controlling the growth of snapshots, reporting on thin provisioned disks and their over allocation, and so on, are areas where scripting comes to their rescue.
The second question that I asked was, why the need to write a book on this topic when there was plenty of documentation available in VMware itself and the PowerCLI community? This is when I realized that most of the documentation available is predominantly written for software developers who are from a scripting background. Having known Sajal for the last four years, I know that he is very much customer-driven. Having interacted with several system administrators in his career, he wanted to write this book purely for VMware administrators who spend every single day managing a virtual environment.
This book starts off with an introduction to PowerShell and PowerCLI. If you are new to it, then it walks you through the process of how to configure and manage hosts, VMs, and networks and storage in detail. But the chapters that I liked the most were Chapter 8, Managing vSphere Security, SRM, vCloud Air, and vROps and Chapter 10, Using REST APIs. Chapter 8, Managing vSphere Security, SRM, vCloud Air, and vROps, goes beyond normal vSphere management and deals with one of the most ignored aspects today, security. I have seen very few customers in India who give importance to security hardening of their VMware environments. With the increasing threat perception these days, it is absolutely imperative for you to pay attention to how you can keep environments secure. Chapter 10, Using REST APIs, discusses how you can use REST APIs to manage other VMware products beyond vSphere that may not have native PowerCLI cmdlets. Toward the end, it also gives you some sample scripts that you can use straightaway in your environments.
I believe that VMware is a very exciting technology company that allows us to deeply influence and rapidly evolve technology and business for our customers, and I want to thank Sajal for writing this book.
If this isn't enough to spark interest in reading further, I don't know what is! I highly recommend that you read this book.
B. S. Nagarajan
Senior Director, Systems Engineering, VMware India