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 vSphere API


Before we move ahead and talk about performing various tasks using vSphere APIs, let's first see how we can utilize them to our advantage. The vSphere API reference is available at vSphere 6.0 Documentation Center (http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp). On the documentation page, you need to go to vSphere API/SDK Documentation | vSphere Management SDK | vSphere Web Services SDK Documentation | VMware vSphere API Reference:

If you look closely, you will see that there are different types of Object categories available:

  • Managed Object types: This is a core data structure of the server-side object model. Instances of various managed object types are referred to generically as managed objects.

  • Data Object types: This is a core data structure of the server-side object model. Data objects are similar to abstract data types (in Java) and the struct data type (in C++). The VMware vSphere management object model uses basic object-oriented features, such as composition...