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

Managing vSphere standard switches


To manage complete vSphere networking, we need two different components. All the cmdlets for standard switches and other one come with the VMware.VimAutomation.Core snap-in/module, and all the cmdlets related to distributed switches are included in the VMware.VimAutomation.Vds module. In this section, we will discuss standard switches; in the next section, we will discuss distributed switches. For all the cmdlets to run successfully, we need to connect to a vCenter server. So, let's connect to a vCenter server and get started.

As you already know, whenever you install an ESXi server, by default a standard vSwitch with the name vSwitch0 is created.

The first thing that we need to do is to get accustomed to the vSwitch in an ESXi host using the PowerCLI cmdlets. For this, we can use the following cmdlets:

  • Get-VirtualSwitch

  • New-VirtualSwitch

  • Remove-VirtualSwitch

  • Set-VirtualSwitch

First, let's try to get a list of virtual switches available in the entire environment...