Alan Renouf gave a vBrownBag presentation on Advanced PowerCLI 5.5R2 last night. During the show, he showed an interesting bit of code:

$output = "" | Select VmName, PgName
$output.VmName = "value1"
$output.PgName = "value2"

This was intriguing to me. The “proper” way to create an object with attributes is to use New-Object and pipeline it through some Add-Member commands.

$output = New-Object PSObject |
Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty VmName "value1" |
Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty PgName "value2"

That creates an excessive, and somewhat unreadable, pipeline for objects with a long list of members, especially if a member’s name is long. It’s a pretty neat trick to make your code look pretty neat.

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A few months ago, Dimitar Barfonchovski created a blog post on accessing the VM Console via PowerCLI, hosted on the PowerCLI Blog. Over the next few days, some cool enhancements came out focusing on a GUI for the featureset – which appear to have been lost to the great bitbucket in the sky, or I’d give some credit to them (if you know what I’m talking about, drop a link in the comments and I’ll update the article). I added a few enhancements of my own and ended up with a quick a dirty pastebin that would allow anyone to authenticate to any vCenter server and get a list of VMs they have access to.

I finally went back and combined this with last Friday’s post on creating a PowerCLI module. With a few tweaks we end up with an auto-import module and the cmdlet Get-VMConsoles. Any user can run this cmdlet. Upon connection to the specified vCenter server, you are prompted for authentication. After successfully authenticating, click Open VM Consoles and you are presented with a list of consoles available to your user. You can add a few filters, as I have done below. Ctrl-click to select the VMs you want to view and hit OK in the bottom right. Your consoles will open in your system’s browser in separate tabs.

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A recent discussion on twitter about creating awesome PowerCLI output reminded me that the joy – and ease! – of creating your own PowerShell module needs to be spread.

If you do things the “right way”, by default you cannot click on a .ps1 file to open it. You need to launch PowerCLI (or launch PowerShell and import the PCLI snapins) and then import the file in whole or in part. Even if you create a new function that you want to use all the time, like a favorite “Get-SnapshotsIStupidlyLeftAroundForTooLong” function, it’s not there just by launching a PCLI/PoSH window. If you then want to modularize your PoSH into discrete parts and re-use them with other functions, you quickly end up with a very large .ps1 file that you import every time to so that all your functions are there. But they’re still functions, not cmdlets.

You don’t need to be a developer to create your own modules. Microsoft has some VERY in-depth documentation on modules that everyone should use. We’ll stick to the highlights as this is PowerShell Modules For Sysadmins. We’ll skip all the stuff about signing your code and making binary modules and focus on what most of us need every day – a way to modularize our PoSH code and streamline our ability to use it. I do encourage you to come back and look at code signing later if you plan to get serious about PoSH.

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Sometimes in the course of your work you’ll find that you need to move data between two datastores on your ESXi host or vCenter server. In my case, this occured twice, once when adding shared storage to my home lab and again when migrating some hosts from VC 5.1 to 5.5 at work. VM data is best moved via storage vMotions, but this may still leave a few files on your datastore, such as the ubiquitous ISOs folder. You could download the files from the datastore, save them on your client, and then upload them to the datastore. That’s fairly clunky, especially with the Web Client, but more importantly, it’s slow and tedious. There’s another way.

The answer is to use PowerCLI and a PSDrive. If you are not familiar with PSDrives, check out this article at the Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog for a primer. The most important command to remember is Get-PSDrive, as that will give you all the information you need to do this again in the future without having to reference this article. If you have PowerCLI installed, you will have a shortcut on your desktop for it. This will launch a window that looks like the command prompt. If you want a little more help as you drive (and you will!), I suggest using PowerShell ISE for tab completion and IntelliType. You can add the PowerCLI snapins with the following commands from the ISE:

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