PowerCLI - 17

Carter Shanklin and the toolkit's architect Andrey Anastasov have written a nice post explaining object-by-name.

"For its Beta, VI Toolkit implemented the get-then-modify usage pattern. Examples include Get-VM "My VM" | Start VM and Start-VM (Get-VM "My VM"). While constituting the very backbone of PowerShell, this pattern isn't always convenient. And, as VMworld user feedback revealed, it’s not intuitive at all. So, for version 1.0 we added what we call object-by-name.

VMware is challenging the world’s VI administrators to a contest of skill, creativity and raw scripting talent. Dbbaskette is the first one who submitted his PowerVDI script. This is a script that takes a Gold Desktop Image and snaps it multiple times by utilizing a backend EMC Celerra Device and iSCSI Luns. It then lunmasks the new luns, surfaces them on esx, searches for vmx files, Imports the new desktops that were discovered into VC and creates a pool and populates it in the VDM Connection Broker. It leverages putty for SSH connectivity (free) , Quest ActiveRoles Extensions (free), and the PowerShell community extensions.

With the update 2 release just launched, everyone is wondering about the next version of VMware ESX. When you do a Google search for ESX 4.0, you’ll find a lot of speculation. But what’s true? A recently released help file part of the VMware Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0 already refers to the new version names.

Get-VMHostModule Specifies the host module name. The valid names for an ESX 4.0 are:

aacraid.o
adp94xx.o
ahci.o
aic79xx.o

Valid modules names for Visor are:

AMDIommu
aacraid.o
adp94xx.o
ahci.o
aic79xx.o
ata_piix.o

Hal Rottenberg over at the TechProsaic announced it’s time for a new series—the VI Toolkit One-Liners!
Hal has written tree great scripts already.

Get Host Server Uptime
Change VM Network
Host Server Hardware Details

When you’re a PowerShell scripter, you should join the VMware PowerShell contest and win some great prizes.

Carter Shanklin created a nice little slideshow about Using VI Toolkit (For Windows) From .NET and uploaded it to SlideShare. Although all the examples are written in C++ you can learn a lot from his presentation. You also should take a look at the VMware Infrastructure .NET Toolkit 1.0 Developer’s Guide. Finally I was able to convert most of Carter’s code to Visual Basic Express 2008 and make a connection to my ESX 3.5 server. Here’s the source code, just paste it under a button.

        Dim MySession As New VMware.Vim.VimClient

        MySession.Connect("https://192.168.178.110/sdk")

        MySession.Login("root", "vmware")

        MsgBox(MySession.ServiceContent.About.FullName)

        MySession.Logout()

Come on you VB guys, let’s create some great tools :-)

This Developer’s Guide, provides information about setting up the development environment and developing applications using the VMware Infrastructure .NET Toolkit 1.0. VMware® provides several different SDK products, each of which targets different developer communities and target platforms. This guide is intended for developers who are creating applications for managing VMware Infrastructure components. The VMware Infrastructure .NET Toolkit is a client-side framework from VMware that simplifies the programming effort associated with the VMware Infrastructure API and server-side object model. It is a part of the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows), which provides easy-to-use C# and PowerShell interface to VMware Infrastructure APIs. Using VI .NET Toolkit you can create, customize, or manage VMware Infrastructure inventory objects using VI APIs calls.