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

Managing vCloud Air


In this section, we will discuss how to manage vCloud Air using PowerCLI cmdlets. Earlier, we had vCloud director available as a cloud solution, and we could use vSphere PowerCLI for tenants to manage the in-house vCloud director environments. With the availability of the vCloud Air and vCloud Air network environments and discontinuity of a standalone vCloud director environment, we now have updated PowerCLI cmdlets with which we can directly manage the workload hosted in the vCloud Air environment. To manage the vCloud Air environment, at the time of the PowerCLI installation, we need to install the vCloud Air/vCD PowerCLI module as well. It is not installed by default:

The vCloud Air/vCD PowerCLI module has two different modules: VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud and VMware.VimAutomation.PCloud. To get a list of the available cmdlets in these two modules, we can use the Get-Command cmdlet:

PowerCLI C:\> Get-Command -Module Vmware.VimAutomation.PCloud | Select Name

Name...