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 REST API servers


REST APIs provide a way to connect to servers by making requests in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). The requests you send to the servers are in the form of a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The responses to the requests may be in Extensible Markup Language (XML), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). REST APIs use a stateless protocol. This means that the servers don't know what your previous request was. You have to send all the necessary information, such as credentials, in every request you make.

Tip

To connect your PowerCLI session to an NSX Manager, access to port 443/TCP is required for REST API requests.

The Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet sends an HTTP or HTTPS request to a RESTful web service. The syntax of the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet is as follows:

Invoke-RestMethod [-Uri] <Uri> [-Body <Object>] [-Certificate
    <X509Certificate>] [-CertificateThumbprint...