VMware: vSphere PowerCLI 101

These days I'm speding some time learning VMware vSphere PowerCLI. I think vSphere PowerCLI is a great tool for automating tasks among vSphere environments. It's so useful to automate repetitive tasks, it allows IT admins to save huge amounts of time performing common tasks using scripts.

To start using VMware vSphere PowerCLI simply go here:

vSphere PowerCLI: Windows PowerShell interface for managing vSphere

You need to download and install VMware vSphere PowerCLI on your Windows machine in order to start scripting.

Here is the official vSphere PowerCLI Documentation

Another really useful PowerCLI document to read is Getting Started with PowerCLI 4.1 – Automating Your vSphere Environment  which contains a lot of useful commands to perform basic tasks.

Last link I would like to share is the VMware PowerCLI 5.1 Poster which presents all PowerCLI cmdlets in a single panel grouping them by function (Network Operations, Logs/Reporting, etc.)

So, let's start with PowerCLI 101 post...

Connecting/Disconnecting to vCenter Server:

To start using PowerCLI you need to connect to a vCenter Server or to an ESXi host

Connect-VIServer -Server <VCENTER_IP_ADDRESS> -User <USERNAME> -Password <PASSWORD>


Example: Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.116.155 -User root -Password vmware

To disconnect:

Disconnect-VIServer


Available Commands:

To list all available commands:

Get-Command

Example: Get-Command *VM*  -> To list all commands containing word "VM" in their name.

To get more infos on a command

Get-Help <COMMAND_NAME> -Detailed


Selecting Columns:

<cmdlet> | Select-Object <COLUMNS_TO_SHOW>

Example: Get-VM | Select-Object Name, PowerState -> To display only name and power state of every VM


Prevent truncated columns:

If a column contains many data it could happen that output it's truncated. To prevent this:

<cmdlet> | Select-Object <COLUMNS_TO_SHOW> | Ft -autosize


Redirecting Output:

<cmdlet> > <OUTPUT_FILE>

Example: Get-VM > C:\List_of_VMs.txt -> To create a file named "List_of_VMs.txt" which contains the list of all our VMs


Exporting CSVs:

<cmdlet> | Export-Csv <OUTPUT_FILE>

Example: Get-VM | Export-Csv C:\List_of_VMs.csv -> To export to CSV infos about VMs


Combining Cmdlets:

<cmdlet> | <cmdlet>

Example:  Get-VMHost esx1.testdomain.com | Get-VM -> To show all VMs running on esx1.testdomain.com host


Nested Expressions:

<cmdlet> | Select-Object @{N="<COLUMN_NAME>"; E={<EXPRESSION>}}

Example:  Get-VM | Select-Object Name, @{N="Datastore"; E={$_ | Get-Datastore}} -> Display VM name and datastore on which each VM resides

In the next post I will provide some PowerCLI useful scripts.

That's all!!