As i said in my last post I’ve decided to start brushing up my non existent knowledge of powershell and learn the applications that link into VMware Virtual Infrastructure and how they can make my daily job easier and more automated. I’ve found many great articles and actually registered myself for two on demand Microsoft live meetings on using powershell a number of months back which i still need to make my way through. The two live meetings I’m planning to go through are:

Introduction to Windows PowerShell: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032314395&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Writing Scripts with Windows Powershell : http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032320637&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Hopefully these will give me a basic basic knowledge of standard commands i can use and how they work as I’m a very big point and click type of person. There are many brilliant resources out there to learn from and reference.

For PowerCLI there is obviously the administration guide. The administration guide has loads of examples and covers both basic and advanced cmdlet usage. I’m definitely going to be spending a fair amount of time reading through and learning everything in the guide.Obviously to do all the great commands in your VMware environment you’ll need to install the PowerCLI application from http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/index.html.

Alan Renouf(@alanrenouf) has written a great blog detailing some really helpful links and documents you can follow and use to learn and perfect your PowerCLI knowledge.I’ll be making my way through this list in the coming days. Alan also has a page on his site where he blogs about any new developments in powercli at http://www.virtu-al.net/category/powercli/

Microsoft has very handy PowerShell Quick Reference guide that has some very good examples for doing stuff in your environment.

Vinternal (@vinternals) has a really great blog page about learning all things powercli http://vinternals.com/powercli-mastery/ which is something I’m planning to get through once i have learnt all the basics from all the above resources. But a really great resource.

But my first port of call is a document detailed on both Alan and Simon Longs blogs that was made available at VMworld Europe last year. As it covers all the basics while teaching me about VMware specific commands.http://blogs.vmware.com/files/vi-toolkit-lab—-vmworld-europe-2009.pdf

If your on twitter and wish to follow me and hear about my progress on my learning of powershell,powercli etc then my username is @greggrobertson5

Gregg Robertson