Book Image

Mastering PowerCLI

By : Sajal Debnath
Book Image

Mastering PowerCLI

By: Sajal Debnath

Overview of this book

Have you ever wished that every morning you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your datacenter in exactly the same format you want? Or whether you could automate that boring, exhausting task? What if some crucial task needs to be performed on a regular basis without any error? PowerCLI scripts do all that and much more for VMware environments. It is built on top of the popular Windows PowerShell, with which you can automate server tasks and reduce manual input, allowing you to focus on more important tasks. This book will help you to achieve your goals by starting with a short refresher on PowerShell and PowerCLI and then covering the nuances of advanced functions and reusable scripts. Next you will learn how to build a vSphere-powered virtualized datacenter using PowerCLI while managing different aspects of the environment including automated installation, network, and storage. You will then manage different logical constructs of vSphere environment and different aspects of a virtual machine. Later, you will implement the best practices for a security implementation in vSphere Environment through PowerCLI before discovering how to manage other VMware environments such as SRM, vCloud Director and vCloud Air through PowerCLI. You will also learn to manage vSphere environments using advanced properties by accessing vSphere API and REST APIs through PowerCLI. Finally, you will build a Windows GUI application using PowerShell followed by a couple of sample scripts for reporting and managing vSphere environments with detailed explanations of the scripts. By the end of the book, you will have the required in-depth knowledge to master the art of PowerCLI scripting.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering PowerCLI
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Different ways to create a Windows GUI


To build a graphical interface in the Windows environment, we can take two approaches: the simpler one is using Windows Forms and the more complex one is using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

The main difference between these two is as follows:

  • Windows Forms: Windows Forms is the name given to the GUI class library included in Microsoft .NET Framework. This is the platform that we can use to build the interface tier for a multi-tier client application. Moreover, an application using Windows Forms is typically an event-driven application supported by the .NET Framework, which spends most of its time waiting for end user inputs in some format. It is basically a graphical API that provides access to native Microsoft Windows interface elements.

  • Windows Presentation Foundation: WPF is a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF employs XAML, an XML-based language to define the UI elements and the relationships...