Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By : Chris Halverson
Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By: Chris Halverson

Overview of this book

Have you ever wished you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your VMware environments in exactly the format you want? Or that you could automate a crucial task that needs to be performed on a regular basis? Powerful Command Line Interface (PowerCLI) scripts do all these things and much more for VMware environments. PowerCLI is a command-line interface tool used to automate VMware vSphere environments. It is used to handle complicated administration tasks through use of various cmdlets and scripts, which are designed to handle certain aspects of VSphere servers and to help you manage them. This book will show you the intricacies of PowerCLI through real-life examples so that you can discover the art of PowerCLI scripting. At the start, you will be taught to download and install PowerCLI and will learn about the different versions of it. Moving further, you will be introduced to the GUI of PowerCLI and will find out how to develop single line scripts to duplicate running tasks, produce simple reports, and simplify administration. Next, you will learn about the methods available to get information remotely. Towards the end, you will be taught to set up orchestrator and build workflows in PowerShell with update manager and SRM scripts.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
PowerCLI Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Duties of the Automation Engineer


Based upon the preceding project, this book ideally tries to cover the Automation Engineer's task list, how to adapt the requirements gathering from the Service Architect, and how to script them. This section outlines the script process for building a VMware PowerCLI-based script, combining it with the Windows-based host PoSH script, and returning output.

Building the script

During the process detailed previously, there were three specific requirements:

  • 200 VMs in a common VM-based folder

  • All servers must have the common NTPSync service running and be tested once per hour

  • All servers must have 10 GB of free space on the C: drive

  • All VMs must be in a common datastore

There is a need to determine whether the scripts can be run independently or must be part of the same script. There is no requirement to have them run together, so we will start with independent scripts for each requirement.

Mixing PowerCLI and standard PowerShell

The idea of running PowerCLI within an...