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 the credential store


If you are logged in to your computer with a domain account, you can use your Windows session credentials to connect to a vCenter or ESXi server. If you are not logged in to your computer with a domain account or your domain account has no rights in vSphere, you have to supply account information every time you connect to a vCenter or ESXi server.

To prevent yourself from having to do this, you can store credentials in the credential store. These stored credentials will be used as default if you connect to a server that is stored in the credential store. You can use the -SaveCredentials parameter of the Connect-VIServer cmdlet to indicate that you want to save the specified credentials in the local credential store, as follows:

PowerCLI C:\> Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.0.132 -User admin
    -Password pass -SaveCredentials

You can also create a new entry in the credential store with the New-VICredentialStoreItem cmdlet:

PowerCLI C:\> New-VICredentialStoreItem -Host 192.168.0.132
    -User Admin -Password pass

You can not only store credentials for vCenter Servers but also for ESXi servers, using the following command:

PowerCLI C:\> New-VICredentialStoreItem -Host ESX1 -User root
    -Password VMware1!

To get a listing of all of your stored credentials, type the following command:

PowerCLI C:\> Get-VICredentialStoreItem

And to remove a stored credential you can use the following command:

PowerCLI C:\> Remove-VICredentialStoreItem -Host ESX1 -User root

The stored credentials are stored in a file on your computer. The default credential store file location is: %APPDATA%\VMware\credstore\vicredentials.xml. But it is also possible to create other credential store files. You can see the contents of the default credential store file with the following command:

PowerCLI C:\> Get-Content -Path $env:APPDATA\VMware\credstore
    \vicredentials.xml

The passwords stored in a credential store file are encrypted. But you can easily retrieve the stored passwords with the following command:

PowerCLI C:\> Get-VICredentialStoreItem |
>> Select-Object -Property Host,User,Password

Note

The passwords in the stored credentials are encrypted. Only the user who created the item can decrypt the password.