PowerCLI 5.1 Release 2 has now been released and can be downloaded here. As always you will find some great new features, bug fixes and enhancements which make PowerCLI even better than before… I know its hard to believe but its true.
VDS Cmdlets
Whenever I would ask the question at VMUG’s or VMWorld, “What would you like to see next from PowerCLI” I would always get the same answer “Support for Virtual Distributed Switches!”.
Previously there has been a fling available and also some work created by community member “Luc Dekens” to use VDS, this was a great start but in some cases was not a sustainable solution as it was either not supported or more complicated to maintain or use.
I am now pleased to tell you that PowerCLI has a new snapin, this snapin is called VMware.VimAutomation.VDS and is for managing Virtual Distributed Switches.
Introduced are 14 new cmdlets which will allow you to perform actions against your VDS configuration, we can use the Get-VdsCommand cmdlet to list the new cmdlets.
An overview of these are below:
| Cmdlet Name | Cmdlet description |
| Add-VDSwitchPhysicalNetworkAdapter | This cmdlet adds host physical network adapters to a distributed switch. |
| Add-VDSwitchVMHost | This cmdlet adds hosts to the specified distributed switch. |
| Export-VDPortGroup | This cmdlet exports the configuration of a specified distributed port group to a specified .zip file. |
| Export-VDSwitch | This cmdlet exports the configuration of a specified vSphere distributed switch to a .zip file. |
| Get-VDPortgroup | This cmdlet retrieves distributed port groups. |
| Get-VDSwitch | This cmdlet retrieves vSphere distributed switches. |
| New-VDPortgroup | This cmdlet creates distributed port groups. |
| New-VDSwitch | This cmdlet creates vSphere distributed switches. |
| Remove-VDPortGroup | This cmdlet removes distributed port groups. |
| Remove-VDSwitch | This cmdlet removes vSphere distributed switches. |
| Remove-VDSwitchPhysicalNetworkAdapter | This cmdlet removes host physical network adapters from the distributed switches they are connected to. |
| Remove-VDSwitchVMHost | This cmdlet removes hosts from the specified distributed switches. |
| Set-VDPortgroup | This cmdlet modifies the configuration of distributed port groups. |
| Set-VDSwitch | This cmdlet modifies the configuration of vSphere distributed switches. |
Remember each of these cmdlets has help built in, to access the help including examples of how you might use these cmdlets use the following:
Get-Help cmdletname –full
PowerShell v3 Support
As well as the new cmdlets for working with Distributed switches and all the other great enhancements in PowerCLI 5.1 Release 2 we made sure we listened to our customers and with the release of PowerShell version 3 it seams that a lot of people are already making use or planning to install PowerShell v3.
You will be happy to know that PowerCLI now supports PowerShell v3, this not only gives you support from VMware but also we are now able to take advantage of some of the great enhancements which PowerShell v3 brings.
Some PowerShell v3 examples…
Simplified Syntax… Making PowerShell and therefore PowerCLI easier to read and quicker to type we can use simplified syntax to give us even more English like statements, before we would have needed to use the {} brackets to compare a property, now we are able to type it the same way we would think it…
The above simple example shows all virtual machines which are powered on.
vCloud Director 5.1 Support
With PowerCLI 5.1 R2 we have also added support for vCloud Director 5.1, you can now automate the latest version of vCloud director using both PowerCLI and PowerCLI for tenants in a vCloud Director 5.1 environment.
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Download
Don’t delay, you can now download PowerCLI 5.1 Release 2 for admins and tenants here and continue the automation of your VMware environment, also check out the change log and online cmdlet reference for more information.
