Sometimes announcements tend to disappear in the cracks of time. When the Script Runtime Service for vSphere (SRS) 1.0.0 was announced, I had the feeling just that happened. When version 1.0.0 of this open-sourced (!) product was released, I had expected much more buzz on social media from VMware PowerCLI users.  This appliance does in fact bring an answer to a wish that many PowerShell/PowerCLI users have had for years: a “Scripting Host“! This Hitchhikers Guide to SRS 1.0.0 post will show how I build my own customised SRS appliance, and how I use it to run PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts ..read more

While Content Libraries are becoming more and more used, there are still some features that are not yet implemented in PowerCLI. So is it for example not possible to mount an ISO file located in a Content Library on a VM. The Set-CDDrive cmdlet is currently lacking this functionality, while the Web Client offers this option. Like often, and one of the VMware PowerCLI features I absolutely like, when a cmdlet is missing a feature, you can fall back on the API to solve the issue. Introduction Like so often, the reason I had a closer look at this issue was due to a question in PowerCLI Community ..read more

No, this is not a post about music. This post will be about my first experiences with the PowerShell Crescendo module, which was just released in Preview 1. Now, why would I care to write a post about a preview of a module? The reason is quite simple. This module is, in my opinion, covering something that was missing in PowerShell. Namely the possibility to use native commands, and present the results as objects. The blog post by Jason Helmick I linked to earlier explains this all in more detail. What follows are my first, admittedly simple, trials using the Crescendo module. If you don’t wan ..read more

In this last part of this series (for now) we will show how to use containers to run your PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts on the deployed instances. And although technically not a ‘real‘ cloud-init post, I consider it related to Part 1, Part 2 and Part3 in this series.  Introduction In Post 4 of the cloud-init series, we ran our PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts natively in the Guest OS of the instance. That might have an impact in some situations. When the first script installs for example the VMware PowerCLI modules, these modules will stay installed in the Guest OS ..read more

For now, the second to last part in this series. And although technically not a ‘real‘ cloud-init post, I consider it related to Part 1, Part 2 and Part3 in this series. In this post I’ll show how you can run scripts on these ‘cattle‘ stations we just deployed. Introduction The purpose of this post is quite straightforward. How can we use the ‘cattle‘ stations we created to run our PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts? Since all the stations we deployed with cloud-init come with the VMware Tools installed, we can use the GuestOperations, and all cmdlets and functions based on these API, to communicate ..read more

In Cloud-init – Part 1 – The Basics, we laid the groundwork for using cloud-init in a vSphere environment. In this post we will go into more advanced Ubuntu setups. This includes deploying PowerShell, v6 and v7, using repositories and if needed, a GUI with Visual Studio Code. For the installation of software on the instance we use the user-data YAML file. In the following sections, we discuss some of the more obvious candidates you want to have on your station. Remember that the basic idea of the series is to have a “cattle” station to test/run (and optionally develop) your scripts. Scripting ..read more

One of the important DevOps adagios in my book is “Treat your servers as cattle, not as pets”. Meaning that you roll out your stations when you need them, use them and throw them away after you used them. This series of posts will document one such way of deploying such ‘cattle’ stations. The method is named cloud-init. In this first part, we will introduce cloud-init and how you can use it from your PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts. Since the Ubuntu distribution is very popular, on-premises and in the cloud, this introduction will focus on that distro to demonstrate the concept. In the following ..read more

How often have you been finding out the PowerShell version you were using, or to which vSphere Server you were connected, or in which git repo/branch your code was being stored, or… Despair no more, it can now be available at your fingertips. The following is a write up of a part of session HBI1729BU ,that was presented at VMworld US 2019. The code shown in this post is also available in the PowerCLI Community Repository. Concept The idea behind this snippet came when I had checked what was in $global:DefaultVIServers for the n-th time in a short PowerCLI session. And it’s probably not only ..read more

Sometimes announcements tend to disappear in the cracks of time. When the Script Runtime Service for vSphere (SRS) 1.0.0 was announced, I had the feeling just that happened. When version 1.0.0 of this open-sourced (!) product was released, I had expected much more buzz on social media from VMware PowerCLI users.  This appliance does in fact bring an answer to a wish that many PowerShell/PowerCLI users have had for years: a “Scripting Host“! This Hitchhikers Guide to SRS 1.0.0 post will show how I build my own customised SRS appliance, and how I use it to run PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts ..read more

While Content Libraries are becoming more and more used, there are still some features that are not yet implemented in PowerCLI. So is it for example not possible to mount an ISO file located in a Content Library on a VM. The Set-CDDrive cmdlet is currently lacking this functionality, while the Web Client offers this option. Like often, and one of the VMware PowerCLI features I absolutely like, when a cmdlet is missing a feature, you can fall back on the API to solve the issue. Introduction Like so often, the reason I had a closer look at this issue was due to a question in PowerCLI Community ..read more