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

Using the Get-View cmdlet to return .NET View objects


When we use any cmdlet, it does a lot of background work and provides us nice, formatted output. This has the positive effect of making our life easier and we can be blissfully ignorant of the underlying complexities. But, due to the same reason, it also runs a bit slower and hides a lot of information. If we want to get more information about objects, then we need to use the Get-View cmdlet. For example, let's look at the output of the following two cmdlets:

PS C:\> Get-VMHost -Name ESXi1.lab.com
PS C:\> Get-VMHost -Name ESXi1.lab.com | Get-View

The results of the preceding commands are shown in the following screenshot:

As you can see from the preceding screenshot, Get-View provides much more detailed information than the simple Get-VMHost cmdlet. We can further pinpoint the data that we are looking for by using the –ViewType and –Filter parameters. The ViewType parameter lets us select the data for a particular type of object...