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 tags


Tags are labels that you can attach to objects in the vSphere inventory. Every object can have zero, one, or many tags attached. You can use tags to group objects based on anything you want.

For example, you can create a John Doe tag that specifies the owner of a virtual machine is John Doe. Using the John Doe tag, you can easily find all of the virtual machines owned by John Doe.

Tag categories are used to group related tags together. Every tag must belong to a tag category. At the creation of a tag category, you can specify to which object types the tags in this tag category can be attached. You can also specify if only one, or more than one, tag in the tag category can be attached to an object.

Continuing the preceding example, you can create a tag category, Owner, which contains the tags for each owner. You can apply this tag category to the virtual machine objects. If you want your virtual machines to have only one owner, you can specify that only one tag from the Owner tag...