A great show thansk to my awesome guests, Alan Renouf (@AlanRenouf) Luc Dekens (@lucd22) and Hal Rottenberg @Halr9000
Lots of links to good places after the break, thanks to Greg Mulholland (@g_mulholland) for providing them in the chat during the podcast
PowerShell Podcasts, Hal’s Power Scripting Alan & Luc’s Get Scripting
Alan’s Where do I start with PowerShell post is a good place for beginners, as is Hal’s book, the Bible for PowerShell with Virtualisation. I bought my copy of Hal’s book from the Book depository. Luc and Alan are working on a new book but it looks like it’ll be next year before you will be able to read it.
Tools for writing PowerShell:
- Quest PowerGui a windows oriented tool and the extension that is the Virtualisation Eco Shell you also want Virtualisation PowerPacks for PowerGui
- PowerShell Plus a more command line oriented.
- Power Workflow for business workflow elements in Powershell
- Primal Forms Community Edition is a visual designer for Windows Forms as a front end to a PowerShell script
Tune in again on June 16th when Rodney Hayward (@rodos)will be Andre’s (@andreleibovici) guest to talk cloud, Rodos will undoubtedly have much to say.
© 2010, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz
2 comments
William Lam
06/04/2010 at 12:17 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hello,
Great podcast, always fun to listen to the PowerCli guru-trio.
There were some comments made around vCLI/vMA that were incorrect.
vMA is not a replacement for vCLI. The vCLI are a set of Perl scripts that provides a similar interface to some of the well known esxcfg-* commands that are found within the classic ESX w/ the Service Console. The reason for these scripts is to aide in managing ESXi, as it no longer had a Service Console and these vCLI commands were basically remote scripts to assist with this. The vCLI utilizes vSphere SDK for Perl which are just the Perl bindings to the vSphere API. It’s also important to note that vCLI is not just for UNIX/Linux, it can be installed on both Windows and Linux. Nothing stops a Powershell/PowerCLI user from making calls out to the vCLI commands that’s installed on a Windows system if needed, such as with “esxcli” utility.
vMA on the other hand is just a VMware RHEL5 virtual appliance that provides a pre-built environment that includes both the vCLI + vSphere SDK for Perl, so that users can just download the appliance and get it up and running w/o much setup or configuration. The vMA appliance can be thought of as a “remote” version of the classic “Service Console” found in ESX and it allows you to remotely manage your VMware infrastructure which includes ESX/ESXi and vCenter server(s). On top of all this, it also has 2 special components (vilogger + vi-fastpass) that’s included within the appliance that’s not found anywhere else.
I definitely agree with the guys’ comments around PowerCLI or (not vs) vCLI. Hal said it best, it really depends on what platform you’re comfortable with and the scripting/programming language you’re most familiar with. One of the best things with an API exposed as a standard web service, is that any language that can talk SOAP can have a client side binding.
Lastly, vMA is actually pronounced “vee-ma” and not v-m-a. The name was originated from VIMA which was the name before the release of vSphere where everything pretty much got rebranded.
For more info about these topics take a look at my site:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/
–William Lam
Andre Leibovici
06/04/2010 at 1:55 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Mr Lam,
Awesome feedback and please be our guest for the next PowerShell and scripting podcast sometime in the future.
Andre