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Have you seen PowerCLI’s “Credential Store” feature?

It just occurred to me that a very useful feature of PowerCLI never got the introduction it deserves. The feature is the Credential Store and as the name suggests its job is to store credentials. As a result:

  1. Credentials are kept securely (no need to hard code passwords along with scripts)
  2. You type less (no need to specify user and password to Connect-VIServer)

So, how does it work in practice?

Say I connect to my VC like this:

Connect-VIServer 192.168.10.10 –User Andrey –Password “my favorite password”

To use the credential store, I do the following:

New-VICredentialStoreItem -Host 192.168.10.10 -User "Andrey" -Password "my favorite password"

Now I can type just:

Connect-VIServer 192.168.10.10

When I don’t specify user and/or password, Connect-VIServer checks the credential store, finds my newly stored credential and uses it.

By default the credential store file is stored under the user profile directory. It is encrypted. If I got you interested, check “help *VICredentialStoreItem” for details.

 

Andrey Anastasov,

PowerCLI Architect