PowerShell

If you are not running windows 2008/Windows 7 and don't have PowerShell (Posh) installed then go get it from Microsoft's PowerShell landing page It is nowadays also offered via Windows Update as an optional update. Then in order to manage your virtual infrastructure you will need the VI Toolkit for windows.

Learning VI-Toolkit Powershell

General Powershell

• Beginners page

• Learning Powershell

• Powershell techniques and tips

• Powershell Tools

VI-Toolkit / PowerCLI

• Virtu-Al: Lesson 1 Time Source

• Virtu-Al: Lesson 2 Service and Firewall Configuration

• Virtu-Al: Lesson 3 Networking

• Virtu-Al: Lesson 4 Portgroups

• Powershell CMDLET list (thank you Alan Renouf for the idea and initial work)

• Managing VMware with PowerShell -- Frequently Asked Questions

• PowerCLI Poster with all the available cmdlets

PowerCLI videos

• Patching ESX with PowerCLI 4.0 U1

PowerCLI Oneliners

Hugo Peeters started with posting so called oneliners to indicate how powerful the VI-Toolkit on Powershell is. After a while this got picked up by others as sort of a sport to see if you can do it in one line. Below is a collection of links with oneliners from great powershell scripters. These pages now contains links to oneliners from Hugo Peeters, Alan Renouf, get-admin.com and Arne Fokkema

• PowerCLI Oneliners: Statistics
• PowerCLI Oneliners: Events
• PowerCLI Oneliners: Host Configuration
• PowerCLI Oneliners: VM Configuration
• PowerCLI Oneliners: Storage

PowerCLI scripts

not categorized

• Remove connected iso's

• HBA Load Balancer

• Deploy and Redeploy vm's (from templates) from a .csv

• Resourcepool Reservation Script

• Add/Remove active directory user accounts who belong to a particular security group on all ESX hosts

• Quick migration

• Out-Dataset Cmdlet

• Introduction to scripting vi using perl or powershell

• Manage VMware Server with PowerShell

• Introduction to the vSphere SDK in Java and C#

• PowerCLI: Oneliners

• How to run PowerCLI scripts from vCenter alarms

VM Configuration

• Restart VMware Tools on all Windows VM's

• PowerCLI: Update VMwaretools without a reboot

• PowerCLI: Add configuration details to VMX

• PowerCLI: Scripted edit of a VMX file

• PowerCLI: Get Virtual Machine disk usage

• PowerCLI: Set CPU Identification Mask

• PowerCLI: Force a VM to enter BIOS setup on next boot

• PowerCLI: Set VM Snapshot location

• PowerCLI: Resolving improper memory limits on your virtual machines

Host Management

• PowerCLI: Report every VM added to vCenter in the last 30 days

• PowerCLI: Get Virtual Machine total size

• PowerCLI: Export and import customization profiles

• PowerCLI: Export Task and eventlogs to file using TaskHistoryCollector

• PowerCLI: Snap reminder

• PowerCLI: Daily Report

• PowerCLI: Get number of vCPU's used in cluster

• PowerCLI: Factory reset of ESXi