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VMware PowerCLI 5.01 released adding vCloud Director Automation

January 10th, 2012

VMware has released what at first looks like a minor update to their PowerShell snapin, PowerCLI to version 5.01. Although just a .01 release which brings the usual changes and bug fixes which are listed here,  the big news is that VMware has added a whole bunch of cmdlets for managing vCloud Director.

A whole new snapin has been created called VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud and this initial release focuses more on the reporting side, so being able to retrieve information from vCD rather than setting things but also does have cmdlets for importing VMs, Templates and .OVFs from vSphere into your vCD environment. This is a great step forward as cloud computing relies so much on automation and having PowerCLI also available means you have so many more options to tie together your automation workflows.

You are able to connect to specific cloud servers, search for objects and then retrieve catalogs, providor VDCs, roles, users, vApps, vAppTemplates, VMs, external networks, media and organisations with their networks and VDCs.

Here are the cmdlets available:

Name Synopsis
Connect-CIServer Connects to the specified servers.
Disconnect-CIServer Disconnects from the specified cloud servers.
Get-Catalog Retrieves the specified cloud catalogs.
Get-CIRole Retrieves roles in the cloud.
Get-CIUser Gets cloud users.
Get-CIVApp Retrieves virtual appliances in the cloud.
Get-CIVAppTemplate Retrieves virtual appliance templates.
Get-CIView Returns cloud views by Id.
Get-CIVM Retrieves the virtual machines on the cloud.
Get-ExternalNetwork Retrieves cloud external networks.
Get-Media Retrieves cloud medias.
Get-Org Gets cloud organizations.
Get-OrgNetwork Retrieves cloud organization networks.
Get-OrgVdc Retrieves organization VDCs.
Get-ProviderVdc Retrieves the specified cloud provider VDCs.
Import-CIVApp Imports a virtual machine from vSphere to a cloud.
Import-CIVAppTemplate Imports a virtual machine or an OVF package from a vSphere server to the vCloud as a virtual appliance template.
Search-Cloud Searches the cloud for objects of the specified type.

This will allow cloud providers to initially improve their own internal reporting capabilities and potentially also allow organisations to write their own PowerCLI scripts to feed into their reporting as well.

I’m sure this will be extended soon in a future release as VMware already has a vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for vCloud Director so extending this API to PowerCLI must be the next logical step to be able to fully provision organisations, networks, vApps etc.

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