New book – Learning PowerCLI – Second Edition

February 23, 2017 Leave a comment

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

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New VMware fling: Onyx for the Web Client

July 16, 2015 1 Comment

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

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PowerCLI 5.8 R1 What’s New?

August 28, 2014 Leave a comment

PowerCLI logoDuring VMworld 2014 VMware announced the vCloud Suite 5.8. One of the components of the vCloud Suite is PowerCLI. The new PowerCLI version is 5.8 R1. The PowerCLI 5.8 R1 features announced during VMworld are:

  • Enhanced startup speed
  • Storage Policy cmdlets
  • Query an OVF/OVA for deployment properties
  • OVF/OVA deployment and configuration
  • Added a filter by tag to more cmdlets
  • Enhanced error reporting
  • Added support for RelatedObject to Get-HardDisk
  • Added filtering support to multiple areas
  • Support for latest version of vCloud APIs
  • New-CIVM cmdlet
  • Support for upcoming version of SRM

These are all great improvements for an already great product. I can’t wait until the vCloud Suite is released to use all of these new features.

Don’t forget that PowerCLI is a free tool and you can use it with all of the vCloud Suite licenses.

You can download PowerCLI from www.vmware.com/go/powercli.

For more information about VMworld go to www.vmworld.com.

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New book – Learning PowerCLI

February 14, 2014 3 Comments

Learning PowerCLI Book CoverI am verry happy to announce that my first book Learning PowerCLI has been published today by Packt Publishing. This book is written for VMware vSphere administrators who want to automate their
vSphere environment using PowerCLI. Learning PowerCLI is written in a friendly and practical style with a focus on getting you started and automating daily tasks quickly and efficiently. If you manage or administrate a vSphere environment, and want to make that easier and more efficient, then this book is for you! It is assumed that you have at least a basic knowledge of VMware vSphere. If you are not a vSphere administrator, but you are interested in learning more about PowerCLI, then this book will also give you some basic knowledge of vSphere. Read more of this post

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Upgrading your VMFS datastores with PowerCLI

June 5, 2013 3 Comments

PowerCLI logoWith the release of VMware vSphere 5.0 a new version of the VMFS datastores was released also: VMFS-5. This new VMFS-5 version has a lot of advantages over the old VMFS-3 version (see for information about the new features Cormac Hogan’s post vSphere 5.0 Storage Features Part 1 – VMFS-5). You can upgrade your VMFS-3 datastores to VMFS-5 while VM’s on the datastores keep running. In this post I will show you the vSphere PowerCLI Upgrade-VmfsDatastore function that will do the upgrade for you. Read more of this post

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How to run VMware vSphere CLI perl scripts from PowerCLI

July 21, 2011 12 Comments

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

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How to use VMware vSphere PowerCLI to find a virtual machine by MAC address

July 18, 2011 10 Comments

PowerCLI logoSometimes you need to find a virtual machine by MAC address. This can be very time consuming if you have to do this by hand using the VMware vSphere Client. PowerCLI can do this task for you in only a few seconds. The script presented in this blogpost will retrieve the virtual machine that has a certain MAC address. Read more of this post

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

July 17, 2011 4 Comments

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

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