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 5. Workflows and vRealize Orchestrator

Mr. Mitchell was true to his word. The boss was given his papers, and you are heading up the DevOps initiative with a budget to get a good start. One problem, where do you start? What needs to be done first?

After a day of reflection, reading, and learning, there were very few articles on the subject. What you found was limited and not as helpful as expected. Then, the "Aha" moment hit you; what do we have already? Frank is always talking about this Orchestrator to do his VMware administration, you think. "Hey Frank, how's it going?" He responds with "Good! I am pretty busy today; what can I help you with?"

You begin by explaining your dilemma and ask where he started with his and what he does with what he develops. He lights up with pride as he explains how he got started and why he decided to script, "I ran into numerous times when clicking through things that I had too many things to do and not enough time to do it, so I started looking into...