While many of the networking configurations can be accomplished with native PowerCLI, one of the things in the networking space that might be useful from ESXCLI objects is the ability to perform ping testing from vmkernel interfaces on a host. By default, the vmk0 interface is the default management interface of the host. In this recipe, you will use this interface and perform ping testing. Unlike a ping from a Windows or Linux system, the results of a PowerCLI ping will return in an object form just like any other cmdlet.

There are a couple of reasons to look at this particular use case. First, there are a lot of positional parameters with the ping. Second, some of the parameters aren't straightforward, and the in-line documentation doesn't explain much about parameters beyond their data types. However, since ESXCLI is the basis for these objects, all of the documentation for it also applies.