You can manage VMware Server with PowerShell too.

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Blogger John Tuffin has made an entry about his experiments managing VMware Server 2.0 Beta with PowerShell. To summarize, you can manage VMware Server with PowerShell, in much the same way you manage VMware ESX.

Thngs that will work include:

  • Listing, creating and deleting VMs.
  • Starting, stopping and resetting VMs.
  • Creating snapshot of VMs.

Things that won’t work include things that VMware ESX supports but VMware Server doesn’t. This is a pretty long list, but some highlight include:

  • You can’t create resource pools in VMware Server.
  • You can’t utilize advanced networking options such as virtual switches in VMware Server.
  • You can’t VMotion VMs between VMware Server instances.

Still, if you don’t have access to ESX this is a great way to find out how easy it is to manage VMware using PowerShell. Not only that, but if you do decide to upgrade to ESX to unlock some of these advanced features, the scripts you write against VMware Server will work against VMware ESX with little or no modification.