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

How to run VMware vSphere CLI perl scripts from PowerCLI

PowerCLI logoWith the announced VMware vSphere version 5.0, ESX servers will be history. Only ESXi servers are left over. And as you might now, the main difference between ESX and ESXi is the service console that ESX has and is removed from ESXi.

To be able to manage ESXi servers, VMware is promoting the VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface (vCLI). And also the vSphere Management Assistant, which is a Linux virtual appliance with the vCLI installed in it. There is also a Microsoft Windows version of the vCLI. That runs in a Windows Command Prompt.

As a PowerShell user I don´t like writing scripts for the Command Prompt anymore. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could run the vCLI commands from PowerCLI? Read more of this post

How to use VMware vSphere PowerCLI to find an ESX/ESXi server by MAC address

PowerCLI logoIn “Virtual machine failed to power on” Monique Vanmeulebrouk describes a problem where in one stage she needed to find an ESX server that has a certain MAC address. Of course you can log in to all your ESX servers and issue the “ifconfig | grep -i hw” command as described in the VMware Knowledge base article “Identifying the ESX Service Console MAC address”. But this method takes a lot of time. You can do this much easier with VMware vSphere PowerCLI. Read more of this post