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

Creating a vSphere scheduled task


In this section, we will discuss ways in which we can create a vSphere scheduled task using the vSphere API through PowerCLI. For this, we will use the ServiceInstance managed object. This is the singleton root object in the inventory.

Note

For more details, please check the vSphere API documentation at Managed Object Types | ServiceInstance (http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp#com.vmware.wssdk.apiref.doc/vim.ServiceInstance.html).

To create a scheduled task, we will use the CreateScheduledTask method. If we examine the method, we can see that this method takes two inputs: an entity (MoRef) and a specification (ScheduledTaskSpec).

To create a task, we need to create a scheduled task specification. This in turn takes six different inputs:

The rest of the values are static but notice action and scheduler. These need to be defined as objects. Note that we defined an Action, which in turn calls the CreateSnapshot_Task method to create the snapshot. As the...