I won’t speculate on whether PowerShell fanatics are more or less likely to be sitting in front of their computers on a Friday night like I am, but regardless of when you read this post, if you use VMware ESX or VMware VirtualCenter, you should download our VI Toolkit (for Windows) Beta and give it a try.

Some of the cool things you might want to try for yourself:

• Snapshot all of your virtual machines at once with a script like:   
  

  Get-VM | % { New-Snapshot -VM $_ -Name ($_.name + "-current") } 1 Get-VM | % { New-Snapshot -VM $_ -Name ($_.name + "-current") }

• Automate long-running tasks like cloning using a script like:   
  

  foreach ($i in 1..30) { Get-Template "My Template" |      New-VM -Name "Clone $i" } 1 2 foreach ($i in 1..30) { Get-Template "My Template" |      New-VM -Name "Clone $i" }

• Disconnect connected CD-ROM drives (to enable VMware VMotion, for example) using a script like:   
  

  Get-VM | Get-CDDrive |                                              ? { $_.ConnectionState.Connected -eq "true" } |      Set-CDDrive -Connected:$false -Confirm:$false 1 2 3 Get-VM | Get-CDDrive |                                              ? { $_.ConnectionState.Connected -eq "true" } |      Set-CDDrive -Connected:$false -Confirm:$false

In total there are 102 PowerShell cmdlets in the Beta that cover all aspects of Virtual Infrastructure management. The most important thing is that you can now easily write scripts, tailor made to your problems, that save you time and frustration, whether that means saving you 10 clicks or 100.

Once you’ve had a chance to kick the proverbial tires, don’t forget to visit our Community Page to give your feedback or to talk with other Beta testers.

Last but not least, congratulations to the VI Toolkit (for Windows) team for all your hard work on this release!