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 ExtensionData property to return .NET View objects


In the previous section, we saw how to access minute details of the objects using the Get-View cmdlet. We can do the same without using the Get-View cmdlet as well. The magic property is ExtensionData. By using this property, we can access the details of an object. Let's examine this in more detail. First, we will get the information of a host and store it in a variable:

PS C:\> $hostInfo = Get-VMHost -Name ESXi1.lab.com

The result of the preceding command is shown in the following screenshot:

Now, let's add the ExtensionData parameter to the variable $hostInfo:

As we can see, it provides the exact same information that we got earlier by using the Get-View cmdlet.

PS C:\> $hostInfo.ExtensionData.Hardware.CpuInfo

NumCpuPackages NumCpuCores NumCpuThreads         Hz
-------------- ----------- -------------         --
             4           4             4 3392312000

For rest of the operations, we can do what we did earlier...