One of my favorite announcements at VMworld happened to be about PowerCLI, of course! The big announcement was about its future availability on multiple platforms, including Linux and Mac OS X. This functionality has been one of the biggest requests the PowerCLI team has received over the years and it is extremely exciting that it’s finally coming!
The announcement actually happened during Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens’ session INF8092 titled: The Power Hour: Deep Dive, DevOps, and New Features of PowerCLI. The response in the room was amazing. Then, when Alan asked who would be planning on running PowerShell and PowerCLI on Linux and/or Mac OS, the amount of hands that went up was staggering. In fact, it was so staggering that Alan had to take a picture:
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how this was all made possible by our friends at Microsoft. This past August, Microsoft actually open sourced PowerShell which in turn opened the ability for PowerCLI to be run on multiple platforms.
VMware, and PowerCLI in particular, were involved as special guests when Microsoft made the open source announcement. If you haven’t checked out the announcement video, it’s worth a watch. Pay particular attention around the 46-minute mark:
At this point, you’re probably looking for more details. PowerCLI Core, the multi-platform version of PowerCLI, will be released as a VMware Fling. However, it has not been made available as of yet. The PowerCLI Engineering team is, and has been, working extremely hard on preparing the release.
I’ve had a chance to play with an early version, and it’s amazing. They’ve done an excellent job and it really is just that cool. It still puts a smile on my face every time I do this:
In the meantime, here is a video showcasing the upcoming Fling:
If you want to watch Alan and Luc’s session INF8092 where the announcement was made and check out all the other awesome PowerCLI goodness that was made available at VMworld, the session is viewable today. It’s also worth mentioning that the session was voted into the Top Ten Sessions of the Day, so I would consider it a ‘must see’! Direct Access to the video available here.
