Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By : Chris Halverson
Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By: Chris Halverson

Overview of this book

Have you ever wished you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your VMware environments in exactly the format you want? Or that you could automate a crucial task that needs to be performed on a regular basis? Powerful Command Line Interface (PowerCLI) scripts do all these things and much more for VMware environments. PowerCLI is a command-line interface tool used to automate VMware vSphere environments. It is used to handle complicated administration tasks through use of various cmdlets and scripts, which are designed to handle certain aspects of VSphere servers and to help you manage them. This book will show you the intricacies of PowerCLI through real-life examples so that you can discover the art of PowerCLI scripting. At the start, you will be taught to download and install PowerCLI and will learn about the different versions of it. Moving further, you will be introduced to the GUI of PowerCLI and will find out how to develop single line scripts to duplicate running tasks, produce simple reports, and simplify administration. Next, you will learn about the methods available to get information remotely. Towards the end, you will be taught to set up orchestrator and build workflows in PowerShell with update manager and SRM scripts.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
PowerCLI Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Comparing Point and Click Administration to PowerCLI and Scripting

It's now 5 pm on a Friday and the report script that your boss asked you to create is ready to run. As the prompts flash on the screen, you say "Yes! It is done". You quickly load your e-mail client and you send the script off. You quietly think, "I should include a fake invoice for $1 million dollars." and chuckle to yourself. You notice that the office is silent and empty, and you begin packing up to go when you notice the datastores beginning to go offline and the VMs going gray. Do you leave and hope the environment is okay or do you deal with this next crisis that is about to surface?

Daily administration can be simple and straightforward and turn to chaos in a matter of minutes. Scripting, automation, and centralized management and reporting are critical to any environment. Orchestration tools, centralized version stores, and prebuilding of commonly used scripts can be crucial when attempting to troubleshoot...