Recently I have had some questions from people using PowerCLI, these are mainly related to confusion around the 5.1 release of VMware products and the way that PowerCLI works so I wanted to use this blog post to answer some of these questions but also to confirm that the future for PowerCLI is bright.
Q. “Does PowerCLI work with the vCenter Server Appliance?”
A. Yes it does, PowerCLI uses the vCenter APIs, in fact the best place to install PowerCLI is the same place that you would use the vSphere Client from, this is normally the vSphere admins workstation or a windows machine used solely for scheduled tasks. PowerCLI connects to the vCenter APIs and therefore both Windows and the appliance versions of vCenter work with PowerCLI 5.1.
Q. “Does PowerCLI work with the vSphere Web Client?”
A. A common question and yet in reality you do not need the C# vSphere Client or the vSphere Web Client in order for PowerCLI to work, everything you need is inside the installer for PowerCLI, just install it (instructions here) and your set.
Q. “With VMware releasing more and more Linux related appliances what does this mean for PowerCLI?”
A. PowerCLI is one of VMware’s most successful and well loved automation and troubleshooting tools by vSphere and vCloud Director Admins, as I said in the answer to a previous question, it connects directly to the vSphere APIs, it doesn’t care what is hosting them.
Whilst I can not discuss the roadmap for PowerCLI I can certainly say its as strong as ever and we will continue to wow the users of PowerCLI with the latest features and updates.
Q. “Does Onyx work with vSphere 5.1?”
A. For those of you who are not aware of what Onyx is, it’s a VMware Fling which sits in-between your vCenter and your vCenter Client, it intercepts the traffic and translates it into PowerShell code, not nicely formatted PowerCLI type cmdlets but still a great place to look if you need to find a way to do something quickly.
You hit play on the Onyx client and the fun begins, anything you do in the vSphere client from then on is captured and represented as code, and not just PowerShell code but also C#, vCO JavaScript and Raw SOAP messages.
So does it work with 5.1 ? Yes of course it does, but only when using the C# client, obviously the vSphere Web Client works differently and therefore Onyx is unable to capture the actions you take in the web client and turn them into code, as this is a fling I can not make any promises of if or when this will be updated to work with the web client but obviously the challenges are different. In the meantime make sure you use the C# client when you want to capture the code.
Hopefully this will help eliminate any questions about PowerCLI and how it works with 5.1 and the future, if you have any further questions please add a comment to this post and we will do our best to answer them.
