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 esxcli from PowerCLI


VMware offers more command-line interfaces for vSphere than PowerCLI. One of them is the vSphere Command-Line Interface (CLI). The vSphere CLI has a command named esxcli. PowerCLI has built-in support for this esxcli command in the Get-EsxCli cmdlet.

Note

There are no New-EsxCli, Set-EsxCli and Remove-EsxCli cmdlets. The Get-EsxCli cmdlet exposes the esxcli functionality for a host. You cannot create a new one, modify, or remove it.

The syntax of the Get-EsxCli cmdlet is as follows:

Get-EsxCli -VMHost <VMHost[]> [-V2] [[-Server] <VIServer[]>] 
    [<CommonParameters>]

Use the Get-EsxCli cmdlet to connect to the esxcli functionality of a host and save the connection in a variable $esxcli:

PowerCLI C:\> $esxcli = Get-EsxCli -VMHost 192.168.0.133

In the vSphere CLI, the command to get information about the CPUs in your host is:

C:\>esxcli --server=192.168.0.133 hardware cpu list
Enter username: root
Enter password:

In PowerCLI, the command...