New book – Learning PowerCLI – Second Edition

Learning PowerCLI - Second Edition CoverToday, my new book Learning PowerCLI – Second Edition was published by Packt. Learning PowerCLI, Second Edition will learn you to leverage the power of PowerCLI to automate your VMware vSphere environment with ease.

Starting with an introduction to the basics of PowerCLI, the book will teach you how to manage your vSphere and vCloud infrastructure from the command line. To help you manage a vSphere host overall, you will learn how to manage vSphere ESXi hosts, and deploy and upgrade ESXi hosts using Image Builder and Auto Deploy.

The upcoming chapters will not only teach you how to create datastores and datastore clusters, but you’ll also work with profile-driven and policy-based storage to manage your storage. To create a disaster recovery solution and retrieve information from vRealize Operations, you will learn how to use Site Recovery Manager and vRealize Operations respectively.

Towards the end, you’ll see how to use the REST APIs from PowerShell to manage NSX and vRealize Automation and create patch baselines, scan hosts against the baselines for missing patches, and remediate hosts. By the end of the book, you will be capable of using the best tool to automate the management and configuration of VMware vSphere.

Compared to the first edition, Learning PowerCLI – Second Edition is updated to vSphere 6.5 and PowerCLI 6.5. Learning PowerCLI – Second Edition contains five new chapters about vSphere Update Manager, vCloud Director and vCloud Air, Site Recovery Manager, vRealize Operations Manager, and using REST API to Manage NSX and vRealize Automation. Read more of this post

New VMware fling: Onyx for the Web Client

PowerCLI logoVMware Onyx has been a very popular fling for many years. You can use Onyx to create PowerCLI code by performing actions in the VMware vSphere client. The created PowerCLI code does exactly what you did in the client. The PowerCLI code can easily be adapted to your own needs.

Unfortunately Onyx was not available for the vSphere Web Client. This was a pitty because since vSphere 5.1, new features were not built into the vSphere client. So you could not use Onyx to create PowerCLI for the new vSphere features. I am very happy that VMware now has released a new fling: Onyx for the Web Client. Read more of this post

Get VMware vCenter Scheduled Tasks with PowerCLI

PowerCLI logoVMware vSphere PowerCLI is missing cmdlets to work with VMware vCenter Scheduled Tasks. In a series of blog posts I will show you some PowerShell advanced functions that you can use to work with vCenter Scheduled Tasks. The first function is Get-VCScheduledTask. You can use this function to retrieve one or more scheduled tasks from your vCenter Server. Read more of this post

How to find VMware ESX(i) servers that need a reboot using PowerCLI

If you install patches to your ESX(i) servers you will probably have to reboot them. But if you don’t reboot them right after installing the patches, how can you find the servers that are patched and waiting for a reboot? Read more of this post

How to use the vCenter Server Settings from PowerCLI to send e-mail

PowerCLI logoIf you use PowerCLI to generate reports and send those reports to you via e-mail, you probably have the sender e-mail adress and the smtp server hard coded in your script. But what if one of those changes? You will have to modify all your scripts. Wouldn’t it be easier if you have stored them in one place, so you have to change them only once? Read more of this post