Supercharge your ESXi deployment with PowerCLI Webinar – Q & A Follow Up

Hello once again everyone!

It’s time for the Q & A follow up post to the PowerShell and PowerCLI webinar I conducted with Adam Bertram a few weeks ago!  This was Altaro’s very first VMware focused webinar, and it was really a blast to talk to everyone about PowerShell and PowerCLI for an hour! Hopefully all of you that were able to attend found the hour to be well spent and you were able to take something back to your jobs to help you with the day-to-day stuff.

As always during our webinars, we conducted a Q & A section at the end, where the attendees voiced their questions, and Adam and I got to the ones we were able to get too. As for the ones we didn’t, due to time constraints, you’ll fine them below underneath the recording of the webinar.

Revisit the Webinar

The Questions

Q: Is there anyway I can get a copy of the large deployment script that was demoed?

Yes! You can find the script that was demoed HERE, along with a description and more!

Q: Do you have a guide for PowerCLI on your website?

We’re still in the process of building content for our VMware blog, but we do have a number of articles that center around Automation. Those articles can be found HERE! Outside of that if you need further PowerCLI Resources, feel free to check out the PowerCLI communities page.

Q: Can we Deploy or Patch ESXi Hosts using PowerCLI?

This is possible to do, and it is actually on our roadmap to create a blog article or series of articles specifically about this. In the meantime look at the help files and the examples for the following cmdlets. They should be able to get you started.

• Copy-Patch
• Get-Patch
• Get-PatchBaseline
• Get-VMHostPatch
• Install-VMHostPatch
• New-PatchBaseline
• Set-PatchBaseline
• Sync-Patch

For example: if you wanted to see the help and example information for Install-VMHostPatch you would issue the following:

# First issue the below to update the Help Files
Update-Help

# Then run the below to get the relevant information
Get-Help Install-VMHostPatch -Example

Q: How do I connect to a Linked Mode vCenter Server?

This functionality is baked right into the Connect-VIServer cmdlet. You can use the below commands to connect to all vSphere servers in a federation:

# We first have to set the DefaultVIServerMode to multiple, to allow connectivity to multiple vCenter instances
Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -DefaultVIServerMode 'Multiple'

# Then you can initiate the connection by issuing the following:
Connect-VIServer "VCENTER01" -AllLinked

Q: Do you have recommendations for deploying VMs from preinstalled templates?

Deploying VMs from templates is very easy to do, and is actually one of the operations I built into my deployment script located HERE. Check it out, and you’ll find a well documented easy to follow section in the script on how to deploy VMs from templates using PowerCLI.

Other Resources

PowerCLI Deployment Script from webinar demo 

Cmdlet Reference

User Guide

PowerCLI Community

VMware PowerCLI Labs

Wrap-Up

Again, as always, we hope this webinar and the associated material was helpful for you! If you have any questions that weren’t addressed in the webinar, or these follow-up questions, feel free to use the comments section below! We’re always happy to assist if there are questions regarding the material.

Hope you enjoy!