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

Enabling and disabling maintenance mode


If you want to shut down, patch, upgrade, or reconfigure a host, you do not want any virtual machines running on the host. If you put a host in maintenance mode, you are sure that no virtual machines will be moved to or started on the host. If the host is running on a fully automated DRS-enabled cluster, the DRS will move the running virtual machines from the host to other hosts in the cluster using vMotion.

The following screenshot of the vSphere Web Client shows the different DRS automation levels that a cluster can have:

To put a host in maintenance mode, you have to use the Set-VMHost cmdlet.

This cmdlet has the following syntax:

Set-VMHost [-VMHost] <VMHost[]> [[-State] <VMHostState>] [-VMSwapfilePolicy <VMSwapfilePolicy>] [-VMSwapfileDatastore <Datastore>] [-Profile <VMHostProfile>] [-Evacuate] [-TimeZone <VMHostTimeZone>] [-LicenseKey <String>] [-VsanDataMigrationMode <VsanDataMigrationMode>] [...