Automating VMware vSphere
Nicholas Marshall, Mike Brown, G. Blair Fritz, Ryan Johnson · 2018
The role of a VMware vSphere administrator has become more demanding as the features and capabilities of the platform are enhanced and integrated with adjacent solutions. Automation can benefit every administrator and every organization that adopts vSphere in their environment and the benefits can be realized regardless of scale or previous experience. This chapter helps the administrators to identify automation available for vSphere, install PowerCLI on Windows, macOS, and Linux, get started with PowerCLI scripting, perform some more-advanced PowerCLI scripting, and access and contribute to the community. It briefly outlines the various vSphere automation tools and the existing experience that best aligns with them. PowerCLI provides the ability to easily manage nearly all components in a vSphere environment. One of the most common uses of PowerCLI is reporting. The administrators can gather tremendous amounts of data about an environment in a short period of time.