Skip to main content

Getting started with Vmware Power CLI scripting

This week I got acquainted with Power cli scripting.Its is fun once we get started with it, and it is easy too..


 Power cli is a wonderful tool that you can use to create scripts for vsphere management. You can get started with it by installing power cli tool.Another easier method is to install power gui. For this you will need to install vi client and power cli as prereq .Once power gui is installed you need to enable the vim plugin from the file menu

You will need the help of both vmware power-cli command line reference as well as the windows powershell reference.


http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/wintk40u1/html/index.html

http://ss64.com/ps/




 Start with the basics . First run few commands on the power cli and understand how they works. Then you can put them together in a script with extension .ps1 . 

For eg try some basic commands like:

Get-VC : Connect to virtual center

eg: Get-VC vcenter.mydomain.com

Get-Resourcepool : get details of resource pool of any location say host,cluster,datacenter

eg: Get-Resourcepool -Location clustername

If you want to store the value in a variable for further use in your script, you can do it as follows

$pools = Get-Resourcepool -Location mycluster

Here all the name of the resource pools in the cluster is stored in the variable $pools. Interesting thing to note is that if there are multiple values, it automatically gets stored as an array.


More posts coming up on power cli scripts :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Windows server 2012: where is my start button??

If you have been using Windows Server OS for a while, the one thing that will strike you most when you login to a Windows server 2012 is that there is no start button!!.. What??..How am I going to manage it?? Microsoft feels that you really dont need a start button, since you can do almost everything from your server  manager or even remotely from your desktop. After all the initial configurations are done, you could also do away with the GUI and go back to server core option.(In server 2012, there is an option to add and remove GUI). So does that mean, you need to learn to live without a start button. Actually no, the start button is very much there .Lets start looking for it. Option 1: There is "charms" bar on the side of your deskop, where you will find a "start" option. You can use the "Windows +C" shortcut to pop out the charms bar Option 2: There is a hidden "start area"in  the bottom left corner of your desktop

Install nested KVM in VMware ESXi 5.1

In this blog, I will explain the steps required to run a nested KVM hypervisor on  Vmware ESXi. The installation of KVM is done on Ubuntu 13.10(64 bit). Note: It is assumed that you have already installed your Ubuntu 13.10 VM in ESXi, and hence we will not look into the Ubuntu installation part. 1) Upgrade VM Hardware version to 9. In my ESXi server, the default VM hardware version was 8. So I had to shutdown my VM and upgrade the Hardware version to 9 to get the KVM hypervisor working. You can right click the VM and select the Upgrade hardware option to do this. 2)In the ESXi host In /etc/vmware edit the 'config' file and add the following setting vhv.enable = "TRUE" 3)Edit the VM settings and go to VM settings > Options  > CPU/MMU Virtualization . Select the Intel EPT option 4) Go to Options->CPUID mask> Advanced-> Level 1, add the following CPU mask level ECX  ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --H- ---- 5) Open the vmx

Virtual fibre channel in Hyper V

Virtual fibre channel option in Hyper V allows the connection to pass through from physical  fibre channel HBA to virtual fibre channel HBA, and still have the flexibilities like live migration. Pre-requisites: VM should be running Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 Supported physical HBA with N_Port Virtualization(NPIV) enabled in the HBA. This can be enabled using any management utility provided by the SAN manufacturer. If you need to enable live migration, each host should be having two physical HBAs and each HBA should have two World Wide Names(WWN). WWN is used to established connectivity to FC storage.When you perform migration, the second node can use the second WWN to connect to the storage and then the first node can release its connection. Thereby the storage connectivity is maintained during live migration Configuring virtual fibre channel is a two step process Step 1: Create a Virtual SAN in the Hyper-V host First you need to click on Virtual