Book Image

Mastering PowerCLI

By : Sajal Debnath
Book Image

Mastering PowerCLI

By: Sajal Debnath

Overview of this book

Have you ever wished that every morning you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your datacenter in exactly the same format you want? Or whether you could automate that boring, exhausting task? What if some crucial task needs to be performed on a regular basis without any error? PowerCLI scripts do all that and much more for VMware environments. It is built on top of the popular Windows PowerShell, with which you can automate server tasks and reduce manual input, allowing you to focus on more important tasks. This book will help you to achieve your goals by starting with a short refresher on PowerShell and PowerCLI and then covering the nuances of advanced functions and reusable scripts. Next you will learn how to build a vSphere-powered virtualized datacenter using PowerCLI while managing different aspects of the environment including automated installation, network, and storage. You will then manage different logical constructs of vSphere environment and different aspects of a virtual machine. Later, you will implement the best practices for a security implementation in vSphere Environment through PowerCLI before discovering how to manage other VMware environments such as SRM, vCloud Director and vCloud Air through PowerCLI. You will also learn to manage vSphere environments using advanced properties by accessing vSphere API and REST APIs through PowerCLI. Finally, you will build a Windows GUI application using PowerShell followed by a couple of sample scripts for reporting and managing vSphere environments with detailed explanations of the scripts. By the end of the book, you will have the required in-depth knowledge to master the art of PowerCLI scripting.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering PowerCLI
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Connecting to a vCenter and other VMware environments using PowerCLI cmdlets


The last topic of this chapter is how to connect to vCenter and other VMware environments using PowerCLI cmdlets.

To use the PowerCLI cmdlets, you need to add the snap-ins and import the modules accordingly. As mentioned previously in the sections The vSphere PowerCLI package and The vCloud PowerCLI package, to connect to a vCenter environment, you first need to add the Snap-in VMware.VimAutomation.Core, and to connect to a vCloud Director environment you need to import the VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud module. If you install the package in its default location and your system is a 64-bit OS, then the location of the module is given in the following folder:

PS C:\>Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core
PS C:\>Import-Module 'C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI\Modules\VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud'

Once the snap-in is added and the module is imported, you will have access to all the PowerCLI commands from the PowerShell ISE console.

Now, let's connect to the vCenter environment by running the following command:

PS C:\>Connect-VIServer -Server <server name> -User <user name>-Password <Password>

Similarly, to connect to the vCloud Director server, run the following command:

PS C:\> Connect-CIServer -Server <server name> -User <user name>-Password <Password>

There are many other options. You can see the details using the Get-help cmdlet or the online help for these commands.