Product Description

VMware is the king when it comes to virtualization. Windows PowerShell has received huge accolades as an extremely powerful tool for automation of IT tasks. These two technologies make a lot of sense together, and VMware is now making that happen with the release of their VI Toolkit for Windows. In "Managing VMware Infrastructure With Windows PowerShell", you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line ("Are any of my virtual machines powered off?") to complex scripts to automate a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines. Simple, yet powerful; concise, yet robust; you will enjoy using this new language to solve your old problems using less code than you thought possible. If you are a system administrator responsible for managing a VMware Virtual Infrastructure (version 2.0 or above), or a standalone ESX Server (version 3.0 or above), then you need this book. Aimed at scripters of every level, the book starts off with a PowerShell primer and continues well into the internals of virtualization on the VMware platform.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18922 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 388 pages

Customer Reviews

Awesome resource to automate and troubleshot your VMware Infrastructure
I've had the pleasure of working with VMware technology for the last 6 years of my IT career. .. I've seen the good, the bad, and certainly the ugly. I ordered this book to simplify my every day VMware tasks. No easy task right? Well this book will help you accomplish that and will certainly make you look great at work. The book has a nice introduction on powershell technology, however it immediately dives deep into the scripting world covering subjects about inventory, reporting, deployment and configs, maintenance, and troubleshooting.
The only wish I have... is the book should come with the scripts on a CD, or allow you to download them from either the author's blog or publishing website. This would save a ton of time recreating many of the scripts.
Never the less, this is a MUST have if you wish to automate many of the tasks in your VMware infrastructure.

Whatever you need to know on PowerCLI and more!
You can call me slightly biased since I was one of the technical reviewers of this book but be sure that I was one of Hal's worst critics/nightmares while he was doing the writing.

This book has all what you need to get you started in automating the management of your VMware environment (and more).

If you follow Hal's blog and podcast, you know he has a knack to bring his audience technical knowledge in a humorous way. This book is no exception. Once you start reading, it will be difficult to stop.

On top of that the book is filled with numerous scripts that will help you in your day-to-day tasks and impress your management.

You should buy it
I'm fairly new to scripting but not so new to infrastructure management. I bought the O'Reilly PowerShell cookbook and read it in preparation for this book. Looking back, I'm not so sure I needed it because Hal goes through almost all his scripts line by line to teach you the methods to the madness.

I can foresee myself referring to this book a lot in the future and have recommended it to friends and peers in the field.

Pros:
Cookbook style to teach you methods.
Easy to read (Humor is top notch considering the competition in IT)

Cons:
I had some difficulty with a couple of the scripts in that they didn't quite run as the book said they would. It very well could be my environment (although I had a couple friends test them with the same results).