I’d like to thank my wife, Kristine, and children, Zachary and Emma, for being awesome. This was a tough one, but with your understanding and support we did it, again. I would also like to thank Luc for getting the band back together for one last ride. It was an honor and privilege to be invited back into this cabal of automation ninjas. Finally, I would thank all the thousands of professionals with whom I continue to interact. Together we are really making a difference, and moving the needle. Keep it up, gang, and be nice to each other in the process.
Nothing would be possible without my wife, Leslie, without whom I couldn’t make it through the day. Your support, tolerance, and love make me a better person; thank you. To Glenn, your enthusiasm, optimism, and all-around brilliance are an inspiration. Don’t ever change. And finally, to my co-authors, thank you all. The teamwork and help throughout this project has humbled me on many occasions.
Of course the book wouldn’t be possible at all without the Sybex team: Mary Beth Wakefield, content development manager; Stephanie McComb, acquisitions editor; Mary Ellen Schutz, development editor; Matt Boren, technical editor; Christine O’Connor, production editor; Elizabeth Welch, copyeditor; Amy J. Schneider, proofreader; and Nancy Guenther, indexer.
In particular, we would like to thank our development editor, Mary Ellen Schutz, for making us all literate. Without her attention to detail, we wouldn’t have been able to produce the complete manual you’re now reading. Arnim van Lieshout, your writing was missed this time, but your work from the first edition permeates its way throughout this edition. Alan Renouf, we missed you this time from the writing piece, but you were an outstanding help in your new role at VMware in getting us access to betas and answers to questions. Finally, we would like to thank Matt Boren, our technical editor. Matt held us all to the highest standards. He left no script unturned and no explanation unchecked. He served as the gatekeeper, ensuring that any code you find herein will run the first time, every time. While we didn’t always see eye to eye, without the professionals at Sybex this book would never have been possible. Thanks, guys, it was a blast.
About the Authors
Matt Boren likes quick, efficient things. Automation? Great. Elegant automation with PowerShell? Even better, he says. Matt began his automation career with Perl and the like in the late 1990s. After many languages across several years, he came to enjoy PowerShell with v1.0 and the VMware VI Toolkit. A couple of years later, in 2009, Matt and his friend AC started the http://vNugglets.com blog, which is now a hearty store of mainly virtualization-focused PowerShell automation nugglets, where the posts also focus on keeping things fast as fast can be. After a few more years, Matt earned the VMware vExpert designation thanks to these blogging efforts and to his VMware Technology Network (VMTN) PowerCLI forum participation. He has held vExpert status four years so far, each year from 2012 to present (2015). Matt continues to find joy in making things faster, stronger, and better. Follow Matt on Twitter at (@mtboren).
Luc Dekens started many moons ago in the mainframe world as a system programmer. While the companies he worked for took Unix and Windows boxes on board, it was a natural evolution for him to expand into those areas. A couple of years ago, Luc was impressed by a new scripting tool, Monad, that Microsoft was bringing to market. When the organization Luc works for was expanding their virtualization platform, he stumbled on a product called VI Toolkit. It was ideal for automating many administrative tasks. Luc was admitted to the early beta program and started contributing to the ever-growing PowerCLI community. After attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, where he did a session together with Hal Rottenberg, Luc started a blog (http://lucd.info).
Brian Graf has worked in many different roles in IT for more than 10 years. He has always had a passion for technology and learning. For the past four years, Brian has focused mainly on virtualization and automation. Brian is a multi-year vExpert and is currently VCAP5-DCA and DCD certified. Brian graduated with a Masters of Information Systems from the University of Utah. He enjoys taking trips and spending time with his wife and kids. You can follow Brian on Twitter at https://twitter.com/vBrianGraf or on his blog at http://www.vtagion.com.
Jonathan Medd is a Senior Consultant with Xtravirt in the UK. He shares PowerShell and other automation content via his blog, http://jonathanmedd.net, and also co-hosts the Get-Scripting PowerShell podcast, which provides information on how to learn PowerShell and what’s going on in the PowerShell world – you can find it at http://get-scripting.blogspot.com. In April 2010, Jonathan was awarded status as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for PowerShell and in 2011 gained the status of VMware vExpert. He has been re-awarded with each of those community awards in every year since. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jonathanmedd.
Glenn Sizemore has held just about every position one could hold in Enterprise IT – everything from cable dog to enterprise architect. Throughout it all, automation has been a passion. He started scripting early in his IT career and had mastered VBScript by the time PowerShell first shipped. He was an early adopter and supporter of PowerShell, and the desire to automate all the things propelled him higher into the solution stack. Today Glenn is a FlexPod Reference Architect at NetApp, where he builds cloud integrated turnkey architectures for use by customers of all sizes. Outside of work, Glenn is the proud father of two beautiful children, an avid automation evangelist, and a hater of negativity.
Andrew Sullivan has worked in the information technology industry for nearly 15 years, with a rich history of database development and administration, DevOps experience, virtualization and storage architecture, and automation evangelism. Andrew started as a Linux administrator fluent in Perl and Python many years ago, but has since learned the error of his ways and now favors PowerShell whenever possible. He blogs infrequently at http://practical-admin.com, pontificating about PowerShell for virtualization and storage automation, vRealize integration for storage systems, and occasionally some actual wisdom. Andrew is the co-host of the NetApp Tech ONTAP podcast, focusing on the NetApp storage ecosystem, and is a regular presenter at VMUGs, Docker Meetups, and other community events.
Introduction
This book is about automation; the title should have been a dead giveaway. More specifically, it’s about automation of your VMware vSphere environment. And, as you might have guessed from the title of the book, we automate with PowerCLI. When we were asked to write this book, one of the first decisions we made was that it had to be a practical book – a book that showed you, the reader, how to automate all the aspects of your vSphere management tasks with PowerCLI. A quick glance at the table of contents will show you that we cover what we considered the most important of these management tasks. We tried to follow the same order that you, as an administrator, will encounter during the life cycle of your VMware vSphere environment. Additionally, the book covers topics beyond vSphere administration, from how-tos for actually running your code to code version control.
Since the release of the first edition of this book, the VMware landscape has widened significantly and so with this release the scope of the areas covered has broadened too. With new chapters on vCloud Director, vCloud Air, vRealize Orchestrator and Site Recovery Manager, DevOps, and PowerActions, plus chapters on networking and storage enhanced with NSX and VSAN content, the range of places we can help you to automate has expanded significantly.
As the saying