In the light of the offically released Virtual Infrastructure Toolkit I decided to create a simple powershell script. I’m planning to create more powershell scripts and post them on virtualfuture.info.

The first one is a script which can remove the connected iso files from the CD drive. Some administrators do not disconnect a CD drive when the have finished use the ISO, the side effects of this behaviour are: the VM regurally polls the CD drive which creates a slight overhead and a VMotion may fail. This script can run unattended e.g. every night so even when an ISO file remains mounted it is ejected everynight. Read the rest of this entry »

People who want to have scripting abilities added to their ESX farm can now finally download the Powershell addon for VMware Infrastructure because is has been officially released and thus supported. This addon is far more easy to learn than visual basic or perl scripting (the previous scripting languages you had to learn if you wanted this kind automation). The VI Toolkit added over 120 commandlets which eases the automation and scriptablity of ESX servers or an ESX farm.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Laverick has written a nice whitepaper about the beta of VMWare’s PowerShell Toolkit. This mini-whitepaper walks you through the setup and configuration of PowerShell for VMware – and how to get up an running with Dmitry Sotnikov’s PowerGUI and PowerPack for VMware.

It’s a really good step-by-step white paper with lot’s of screenshots so even a VMWare dummy can start using PowerShell using this.

You can download the white paper here.

More information about using PowerShell for VMWare can be found on this VMWare Blog : http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/