Friday was the second and last day of the Automation course, i would say that i now have learned some more of the powerCLI and also of powershell. As the material was for the vSphere 4.0 and powerCLI 4.0 u1, some of the lab commands came up as deprecated (which means that there is a new cmdlet that could be used instead) because the lab kit that we used had ESXi 4.1 u1 and PowerCLI 4.1.1. Also i would like an update of the lab material in some task that could be shortened (which i showed my lab partner) instead of of setting variable that is only used once. At some parts of the lab material there are sometimes used alias and sometimes the cmdlet, could cause confusion, but it is also good that it shows different ways of getting the same result, as long as the student think and not only write what it says. I don´t know if just our group was faster than others but we did complete all labs quite fast. I would have liked that either the instructor or the material included some more examples, scripts and other stuff that a VMware Automation Admin uses! I showed a fellow student mr Renoufs vCheck Script, and he really liked it 🙂

 

On twitter i got a question to blog about my tweet that said deployment of servers from a csv file, as there is more than one way to do it i found a shorter way as i said above than in the labs, this is the edited command from a presentation of Alan Renouf and Luc Decens that also uses a template and a OS customization file for the deployment.

Import-CSV C:\Scripts\Servers.csv | Foreach { New-VM -Name $_.Name -VMHost <code>
(Get-VMHost bimini02.rtsvl.local) </code>
-Datastore (Get-Datastore SharedVMs) <code>
-Template $_.Template </code>
-OsCustomizationSpec WinSpec02 -RunAsync}

And when you are ready playing around you run the following command,

Get-VM Br* | Remove-VM -Confirm:$false

This of course that your playing machines are called something like Br… and that no other production machines are named starting with that 😉