If you’ve noticed that my blog posts have been a bit light over the last year, I am happy to finally tell why.  Last week, my first book published.  It was many months in the making, a lot of effort and it is now in the wild.  PowerCLI Cookbook is written to be a guide for beginners to intermediate scripters who want to learn more about PowerCLI.  The format is a Packt Publishing Cookbook, which is a step-by-step guide on how to create complex scripts and routines to solve certain problems.  Although each recipe solves a specific problem, the recipes also cover ways to explore the PowerCLI objects and discover how to do similar things for other problems.
The real power of PowerCLI comes from the native PowerShell pipeline and well-formed data objects. Â The book covers both of these to help readers get a handle on how to leverage these features in ways that help create scripts for any purpose administering vSphere and vCloud.
I summed up my whole intent for the book with a tweet this week…
If you’re repeating the same steps in #vSphere more than once, there’s an easier way & #PowerCLI Cookbook shows how http://t.co/E2CVdRpOgx
— Philip Sellers (@pbsellers) April 2, 2015
The book is available from Amazon in print and as a Kindle ebook and is also available from the Packt Publishing website. Â Packt also has the first chapter available for free as a sample on their website.
Some highlights
- Put together an automation script for configuring ESXi hosts
- Configure and manage vCenter Server and vSphere clusters
- Automate DRS share balancing in clusters
- Use and manage vSphere snapshots on virtual machines
- Manage DRS affinity group memberships by building custom functions
- Auditing vSphere configuration by leveraging native PowerShell commands
- Create objects with data for reports and format output
- Use VMware Tools and PowerCLI to execute native commands in the VM guest OS
- Extend the PowerCLI reach by using ESXCLI objects1
- Perform vCloud administration
- and much much more…
By the Numbers
- 247 Pages
- 77 step-by-step recipes
- 10 Chapters
- 9 months, start to finish
