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

vRealize Orchestrator


vRealize Orchestrator is an automation and workflow engine that performs remote operations on dissimilar systems for the purpose of removing human error from a task. There are other workflow engines that exist in different software platforms and perform similar types of system integration, but vRO is the best one for VMware and its various stacks. vRO began, through an acquisition from a Swiss company named Dunes in 2007, from a product named Virtual Service Orchestrator or VS-O, and became one of the best tools that no one knew about. The software would allow the graphic mapping of a process and the placement and running of scripts within the workflow. For years, there was simply no documentation or blogs about the product and it became a niche skill for the savviest Administrators.

With the purchase of Dynamic Ops in 2012, more and more Administrators were picking up the reigns of this orchestration software and Orchestrator eventually became intertwined with vCenter...