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

Image Builder with PowerCLI


The vSphere Image Builder CLI is a process or tool used to build custom ESXi images or software bundles, which can later be installed using the update manager. It is actually a collection of PowerCLI cmdlets that gives you the power to do the earlier mentioned tasks. In most cases, VMware partners use it extensively so that they can build their own images. For example, let's assume that particular server hardware requires a few special drivers for the ESXi server to run properly on that platform. So, we have two options: either we need to install these special drivers after the installation of the ESXi server or we can preinclude them in the ESXi image itself so that we don't need to install any drivers later on. In most cases, the second approach is preferred by most hardware vendors, so you will get vanilla ESXi images from the VMware site, but if you download the ESXi image available from a server vendor site, it includes the added drivers required for the...