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

Connecting to vCloud Air servers and vCloud Director servers


Before you can start to use PowerCLI cmdlets to manage a vCloud Air or a vCD environment, you have to establish a connection to a vCloud Air or vCD server.

Tip

You can start any of the VMware Hands-on Labs for vCloud Air, to get a temporary vCloud Air account. Such a temporary vCloud Air account can be used to try the examples in this chapter. The temporary account will be reset after exiting the lab. You can find the VMware Hands-on Labs at http://labs.hol.vmware.com/ . While writing this chapter, I used HOL-1782-HBD-1 - VMware vCloud Air - Data Center Extension for testing. After starting the lab, you have to go to http://checkin.vcahol.com and enter your e-mail address to get your student account.

In the following image, you will see the temporary credentials we received from the Hands-on Lab.

The Connect-CIServer cmdlet establishes a connection to the specified vCD servers.

The syntax of the Connect-CIServer cmdlet is as follows...