Introduction

Welcome to the Fourth Annual Demo Days hosted by the Indianapolis VMware Users Group.

PowerCLI is a free product from VMware. It provides PowerShell cmdlets to manage your virtual environment. You can download the software and obtain online cmdlet reference here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/PowerCLI/. Installation should put an icon on your desktop that will open PowerShell with the PowerCLI snapin added. For purposes of this lab, this step has already been completed.

Additional Resources
Free ebook on general PowerShell: http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/
Getting Started with PowerCLI 4.1 http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-13700
PowerGUI PowerPacks for Virtualization http://powergui.org/index.jspa
One-liners list from Alan Renouf http://www.virtu-al.net/script-list/

This self pased lab should take approximately 1 hour. At the end of the lab we will ask you to complete a quick survey. If you provide your email address we will inform you when this lab content will be available for download.

This lab environment is made up of the following devices:

vCenter Server (localhost)

Two ESXi 4.1 host (named esxi01 and esxi02)

Four virual machines running on the above ESXi hosts (named alpha, bravo, charlie and delta)

Shared iSCSI appliance (Openfiler)

The servers were contained in a vApp hosted by Bluelock for the purposes of this demo. Unfortunately, this vApp is no longer available for testing.