PowerCLI 6.5 was announced last week at VMworld Europe and, while we are waiting for it to be generally available, we thought it would be a good time to give you an idea of what to look forward to in the meantime.
What’s New
VMware, with PowerCLI, was one of the early adopters of PowerShell and in the PowerShell v1.0 days, snap-ins were the only way to extend the shell for additional functionality. With each release of PowerCLI we’ve been progressing the switch over to using modules and with PowerCLI 6.5, it will be 100% module based! Thanks to all the hard work of the PowerCLI Engineering team, the migration is finally complete!
Core vSphere Module
The Core vSphere module has received a number of new updates too. The Move-VM cmdlet now supports cross vCenter vMotion. The ability to specify the number of cores for a VM has been added to the New-VM and Set-VM cmdlets. The last of the big updates to the Core module is that the Open-VMConsoleWindow now uses the latest version of the VMware Remote Client (VMRC).
VSAN Cmdlets
The storage module has been a big focus and has some major new updates as well. There are a lot of new VSAN cmdlets being introduced in this release. The ability to get and set VSAN cluster configurations, manage VSAN fault domains, update the HCL database, perform various VSAN tests, and a few other features too!
VVol Cmdlets
Continuing on the topic of the storage module, there are also some fantastic new cmdlets added to also work with VVOL replication. We can now retrieve and sync replication groups as well as retrieving and/or starting the replication failover preparation, and even starting the replication failover itself.
Horizon Module
Last, but certainly not least, of the big updates to PowerCLI 6.5 is a complete re-write of the Horizon View module. The module can be ran from anywhere, instead of just on the View Connection server. The module is also installed with the PowerCLI installer. The module will give you access to the Horizon View Public API and there will be some advanced functions available on the PowerCLI Example Scripts GitHub repo upon release.
Summary
There’s lots of cool new features and improvements coming in the next release of VMware PowerCLI, and it will be released side by side with vSphere 6.5 later this year. Over the next couple of months there will be several blog posts posted which will highlight many of these new features and how to put them to use in your own environments.
