Book Image

Learning PowerCLI - Second Edition

By : Robert van den Nieuwendijk
Book Image

Learning PowerCLI - Second Edition

By: Robert van den Nieuwendijk

Overview of this book

VMware vSphere PowerCLI, a free extension to Microsoft Windows PowerShell, enables you to automate the management of a VMware vSphere or vCloud environment. This book will show you how to automate your tasks and make your job easier. Starting with an introduction to the basics of PowerCLI, the book will teach you how to manage your vSphere and vCloud infrastructure from the command line. To help you manage a vSphere host overall, you will learn how to manage vSphere ESXi hosts, host profiles, host services, host firewall, and deploy and upgrade ESXi hosts using Image Builder and Auto Deploy. The next chapter will not only teach you how to create datastore and datastore clusters, but you’ll also work with profile-driven and policy-based storage to manage your storage. To create a disaster recovery solution and retrieve information from vRealize Operations, you will learn how to use Site Recovery Manager and vRealize Operations respectively. Towards the end, you’ll see how to use the REST APIs from PowerShell to manage NSX and vRealize Automation and create patch baselines, scan hosts against the baselines for missing patches, and re-mediate hosts. By the end of the book, you will be capable of using the best tool to automate the management and configuration of VMware vSphere.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Learning PowerCLI Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using arrays and hash tables


In PowerCLI, you can create a list of objects. For example, red, white, and blue is a list of strings. In PowerShell, a list of terms is named an array. An array can have zero or more objects. You can create an empty array and assign it to a variable:

PowerCLI C:\> $Array = @()

You can fill the array during creation using the following command line:

PowerCLI C:\> $Array = @("red","white")

You can use the += operator to add an element to an array:

PowerCLI C:\> $Array += "blue"
PowerCLI C:\> $Array
red
white
blue

If you want to retrieve a specific element of an array, you can use an index starting with 0 for the first element, 1 for the second element, and so on. If you want to retrieve an element from the tail of the array, you have to use -1 for the last element, -2 for the second to last, and so on. You have to use square brackets around the index number. In the next example, the first element of the array is retrieved using the following command...