It is our pleasure to announce the evaluation of PowerCLI for vCloud Air On-Demand, this is an updated module which replaces your current PowerCLI 6.0 vCloud Air module and enables you to make a connection to the On-Demand portion of vCloud Air and use all other automation cmdlets to work with vCloud Air.
Whether it be reporting, provisioning or configuration, PowerCLI is a great tool to work with both your on-premises VMware environment and also your vCloud Air resources.
It’s a great day in PowerCLI! As of PowerCLI 6.0 R1, we have merged the PowerCLI for Tenants installer into the core PowerCLI installer. Now customers only need to download a single installer for all PowerCLI use-cases. When installing PowerCLI you will be prompted to choose which ‘Features’ you would like to install.
Why is this great? This is great because now it is easier for our customers to install PowerCLI and select the items they need. One download, one install… Simplicity.
Did you see that PowerCLI now connects to vCloud Air? Did you also see that we there is a great vCloud Air Meets PowerCLI blog series being posted on the https://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud page?
As the Pre-Req Automation Script has been such a hit over the past 12 months I continue to update it for the requirements of each release of vCloud Automation Center and now vRealize Automation. I have received scores of emails and tweets telling me how it saved the users hours of hassle. And so here I am, releasing a Pre-Req Automation Script for vRA 6.2 which is now Generally Available on MyVMware.
The new version can be grabbed from Github HERE. For those that are new to Github you CANNOT just right-click on this link and hit ‘save as’. that will not work. You will want to click on the file, choose “Raw” and copy the script to a .ps1 file on your machine. (There were several comments on my previous blogs about the confusion of downloading the script)
How to use the script
There are a few new options in this script that I added last version, but didn’t take the time to really blog about. So let’s get into it. If the script is run “out of the box” you’ll be presented with something like this:
I am pleased to announce that vSphere PowerCLI 5.8 R1 is now Generally Available to the public. With this comes new features and extensibility into Storage policy based management, Easily deploy OVF/OVA files with new configuration options, Support for newer versions of vCloud Director (vCD), vCloud Air, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and more!
Below is an overview of the updates that you can find within this latest release.
There have been a lot of downloads of my initial vCAC Prereq Automation script that I released in December 2013. I had written that specifically for Server 2008 and as some of you found out, it didn’t work for Server 2012. Although there was only a slight modification needed, many were unsure of what to change. This led me to creating v2 of the script, which also includes another feature.
I was asked recently if we were able to retrieve the disk space of a VM in vCloud Director through PowerCLI, on checking this I found that it is not currently part of the CIVM object and also there is currently no Get-HardDisk cmdlet equivalent like in the vSphere snapin.
After looking through the REST API Reference Documentation –> User Operations I found an entry for the VM VirtualHardwareSection and specifically the disks which can be found as can be seen here: GET /vApp/{id}/virtualHardwareSection/disks
The virtualhardwaresection is easily accessed via PowerCLI using the extensiondata property which allows access to the back end API, I could then find my disk properties by filtering on the description of Hard Disk as in the example below:
(Get-VM MyCloudVM).ExtensionData.getvirtualhardwaresection().Item | Where { $_.Description -like “Hard Disk”}
Now I had the hard disk I noticed that part of the information was the capacity as highlighted below:
With this information I could then find the capacity of the disk and add the information I needed into more of a friendly PowerShell property to the Hard Disk object.
So tying this all back together we could easily use the .ExtensionData reference to create our own Advanced PowerShell function to return the hard disk information for any CIVM.
The following shows an example of how to use this new function and the output, this of course can also be used to export into CSV/HTML/Text or any other format PowerShell can be used with, it is also great for reporting on where the disk space in your cloud is being used!
Function Get-CIVMHardDisk {
Param (
[Parameter(Mandatory=$True,ValueFromPipeline=$True,ValueFromPipelinebyPropertyName=$True)]
$CIVM
)
Process {
$AllHDD = $CIVM.ExtensionData.getvirtualhardwaresection().Item | Where { $_.Description -like “Hard Disk”}
$HDInfo = @()
Foreach ($HD in $AllHDD) {
$HD | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name “Capacity” -Value $HD.HostResource[0].AnyAttr[0].”#text”
$HD | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name “VMName” -Value $CIVM.Name
$HDInfo += $HD
}
$HDInfo
}
}
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PowerCLI 5.1 is now generally available, as a reminder, in the previous post we gave you an update of what was new. You can view that post here.
You can view the official PowerCLI release documentation here or the documentation for the Tenant snapin here.
From now on you will see two download links for PowerCLI, one for the updated version of PowerCLI and another for the Cloud Tenants, make sure you choose the correct one as they will not install together.
As you can see from the download page, the updated PowerCLI for vSphere and vCD Administrators is on the left hand side and the PowerCLI for Tenants of vCloud Director is on the right.
Stay tuned for more posts showing exactly what is possible with these new releases soon.
Use the following link to be directed to the download page: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/powercli?view=overview
