Thursday, July 31, 2008

PowerShell Support in VMware VI Toolkit

I am not even close to being a PowerShell guru. But I have had the opportunity to get my hands dirty when working with Microsoft's virtualization management product, System Center Virtual Machine Manager SCVMM has the claim as the first product built entirely upon PowerShell. Any and every action performed through the SCVMM GUI uses PowerShell to run the task. The trend in Microsoft seems to be towards moving all management products to this model. and with good reason. Allowing a user to see the scripts that their actions in the GUI are creating gives them great examples to work with. Plus PowerShell has been met with high praise, and what better praise than to be adopted by a competitor...

It has been news for awhile now that VMware would include PowerShell support in a VI Toolkit. I have not had the opportunity to play with it yet but I thought the news was great. I ran across this post tonight. PowerGUI now has a plugin that allows you to run in directly in the VI Client! This tool will provide a similar type of "use a GUI to generate a script" functionality that SCVMM does.