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PowerCLI Cookbook

PowerCLI Cookbook

By : Philip Brandon Sellers
4.8 (4)
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PowerCLI Cookbook

PowerCLI Cookbook

4.8 (4)
By: Philip Brandon Sellers

Overview of this book

If you are a virtualization professional who wants to unleash the power of automation and combat the complexity of sprawling virtual environments, this book is ideal for you. This book will enhance your skills of administering VMware vSphere and vCloud Director with PowerCLI.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
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Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. Configuring the Basic Settings of an ESXi Host with PowerCLI
1. Configuring the Basic Settings of an ESXi Host with PowerCLI
Introduction
Connecting to an ESXi host or a vCenter instance
Getting the VMware host object
Joining an ESXi host into Active Directory
Enabling services and setting security profiles
Setting network configuration
Creating datastores on an ESXi host
Configuring syslog settings on an ESXi host
Joining an ESXi host to vCenter
Creating a configuration script to set all properties uniformly
2
2. Configuring vCenter and Computing Clusters
2. Configuring vCenter and Computing Clusters
Introduction
Creating a virtual datacenter in vCenter
Creating a cluster and adding ESXi hosts
Setting cluster advanced features, including HA, DRS, and EVC
Setting up resource pools
Setting up folders to organize objects in vCenter
Setting permissions on vCenter objects
3
3. Managing Virtual Machines
3. Managing Virtual Machines
Introduction
Deploying the first virtual machine
Cloning a virtual machine to a template
Deploying new virtual machines from a template
Importing a virtual appliance from OVA
Performing a hot add of virtual hardware to an existing virtual machine
Enabling and disabling Fault Tolerance on a virtual machine
Increasing the disk space in a virtual machine
Upgrading the virtual hardware version of a virtual machine
Locating and reloading inaccessible or invalid virtual machines
Setting VMware Tool settings from PowerCLI
Creating basic reports of VM properties using VMware Tools and PowerCLI
4
4. Working with Datastores and Datastore Clusters
4. Working with Datastores and Datastore Clusters
Introduction
Performing Storage vMotion
Finding Raw Disk Mappings in your environment
Locating thin or thick provisioned disks
Converting thin to thick disks with Storage vMotion
Creating and managing datastore clusters
Setting Storage DRS automation levels for individual virtual machines
Setting Storage DRS automation levels for individual VMs using PowerCLI 6
5
5. Creating and Managing Snapshots
5. Creating and Managing Snapshots
Introduction
Creating a snapshot
Getting a list of snapshots in the environment
Manipulating the list of snapshots to get better information
Scoping and filtering a list of snapshots
Removing targeted snapshots
Find lost or unknown snapshots
Creating a function to automatically remediate snapshots
Scheduling automatic snapshot remediation
Creating a snapshot management module
6
6. Managing Resource Pools, Reservations, and Limits for Virtual Machines
6. Managing Resource Pools, Reservations, and Limits for Virtual Machines
Introduction
Setting reservations and limits for resource pools
Balancing share allocations on resource pools
Creating a custom attribute with a number of shares per VM on each resource pool
Automating share allocation balancing
Reporting shares, reservations, and limits of resource pools and virtual machines
7
7. Creating Custom Reports and Notifications for vSphere
7. Creating Custom Reports and Notifications for vSphere
Introduction
Getting alerts from a vSphere environment
Basics of formatting output from PowerShell objects
Sending output to CSV and HTML
Reporting VM objects created during a predefined time period from VI Events object
Setting custom properties to add useful context to your virtual machines
Using PowerShell native capabilities to schedule scripts
8
8. Performing ESXCLI and in-guest Commands from PowerCLI
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8. Performing ESXCLI and in-guest Commands from PowerCLI
Introduction
Retrieving the ESXCLI object in PowerCLI
Using the ESXCLI vm namespace to kill a misbehaving VM
Performing ESXi ping with an ESXCLI object
Configuring custom storage and path selection policies
Configuring coredump settings for an ESXi host from PowerCLI
Executing native commands inside the guest operating system from PowerCLI
9
9. Managing DRS and Affinity Groups using PowerCLI
9. Managing DRS and Affinity Groups using PowerCLI
Introduction
Applying recommendations for partially automated DRS clusters
Setting a cluster into maintenance mode with PowerCLI
Using native DRS rule cmdlets to manage KeepTogether and Separate rules
Learning the MoRef way of identifying objects
Creating a DRS group for virtual machines
Listing the members of a DRS group
Updating the members of a VM DRS group
Creating a custom function to update members of a DRS group
Creating rules to maintain memberships of DRS groups using a custom function
Using Compare-Object to audit group memberships for differences
10
10. Working with vCloud Director from PowerCLI
10. Working with vCloud Director from PowerCLI
Introduction
Connecting to a vCloud environment
Creating and managing organizations in vCloud
Creating a new user in an organization using Views
Creating an organization's virtual datacenter in vCloud Director
Importing a vApp template into vCloud
Configuring networking in a vCloud vApp
Reassigning vApp VM network settings with PowerCLI
Starting and stopping vApps and individual VMs in a vCloud
11
A. Setting up and Configuring vCloud Director
A. Setting up and Configuring vCloud Director
The hosted vCloud environment
Deploying the vCloud Director environment from AutoLab
Build your own vCloud Director implementation on your vSphere lab environment
Additional resources
12
Index
Index

Retrieving the ESXCLI object in PowerCLI

To begin leveraging ESXCLI from PowerCLI, you need to obtain an ESXCLI object and begin looking through the structure of the object. In particular, the methods attached to an ESXCLI object are powerful for performing configuration tasks on a host.

ESXCLI is limited in scope to an individual ESXi host. This means that it is not aware of vCenter and performing an operation on many hosts is going to require you to loop through a set of defined hosts to execute the same operation.

ESXCLI works differently than PowerCLI. Where PowerCLI is object-based and all of the data and methods for changing data are stored within objects, ESXCLI works on the concept of namespaces. There are 14 namespaces that comprise ESXCLI. If you run esxcli on the direct console of an ESXi host, the output is the list of namespaces with a description of each. The output is pictured in the following screenshot:

On a clean installation of ESXi 5.5, there are 13 namespaces output. The...

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