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

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed the general best practices for PowerShell. We also discussed two sample scripts. The scripts that I used were not the final ones; they contain some portions that do not adhere to the best practices. I discussed those points and mentioned them here. It is intentional as I want you to work on it and give suggestions so that we can rectify this script. It is a task and challenge for you.

In the entire book, I have not given any tasks for practice. These two scripts are the practice scripts for you. Visit my blog and comment there so that we can take it forward. These scripts might not be useful to you in their current state, but they were provided as a starting point to help sharpen your skills.

I plan to host two more scripts in the blog. The first one is Set-Security, which will set the security of the entire vSphere environment as per VMware best practices (it will be the logical next step of Get-Security). The next one will be for elaborate reporting...