Monday, May 2, 2016

VMWare PowerCLI - Getting command and remote connection Part 1

Recently we purchase VMware ESXi 6.0 Standard Edition, we did not go for Enterprise Plus edition which have the DRS and other nice feature due to budgets issue.
In my environment we have 16 ESXi host configured as 3 cluster
- Production
- DMZ
- MGMT (vCenter - SRM - vOps)
After installing ESXi, it come the boring part which is doing the configuration 16 time for each host as we dont have DRS
The Configuration include the following:
  • vSwitch
    • NIC Teaming Policy
    • VMKernel
    • Security Profiles
  • Virtual PortGroup
    • I have a lot.. 
  • NTP Configuration
  • Start and stop services
And other details, doing this on server by server is a real time wasting, luckily VMWare have PowerCLI which is a Powershell module for ESXi, you can download and read about it here
As any other module or new module I have to work with the first thing to do is to import the module and discover its commands.
Run the following command on the computer were you install PowerCLI

    Get-Module -ListAvailable -Name vmware* | select name


The result will return the following modules


Name
----
VMware.VimAutomation.Cis.Core
VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud
VMware.VimAutomation.Core
VMware.VimAutomation.HA
VMware.VimAutomation.License
VMware.VimAutomation.PCloud
VMware.VimAutomation.SDK
VMware.VimAutomation.Storage
VMware.VimAutomation.Vds
VMware.VimAutomation.vROps
VMware.VumAutomation


The main module we will use it VMware.VimAutomation.Core, which include almost everything we need
you can import the module using PowerShell_ISE 

Once you import the module you will be able to see the module name in the module list, by selecting it all the command will appear in the list which will make your life easier.
Or if you want you can use the PowerCLI itself to access the ESXi Command and list them by using
get-command -Module VMware.VimAutomation.Core

Now you are ready to go :)

If you dont have PowerCLI installing in your computer and u wana import the command from remote server that have ESXi modules installed, you can use the following script

$RemoteCLI = New-PSSession -ComputerName PowerCLIServer
Invoke-Command -Session $RemoteCLI -ScriptBlock { Import-Module VMware.VimAutomation.Core }
Import-PSSession $RemoteCLI

Now you have ESXi Powershell modules and you can use then to execute and ESXi command

In My Next Post I will write about also basic understanding for PowerCLI and how to start using its commands

Hope this help

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Hope this help as a start yet more interesting information are coming.
 

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