PowerCLI Cookbook: Over 75 step-by-step recipes to put PowerCLI into action for efficient administration of your virtual environment

Philip Brandon Sellers

$19.99 per month

4.8 (4 Ratings)

Paperback Mar 2015 274 pages 1st Edition

Philip Brandon Sellers

$19.99 per month

4.8 (4 Ratings)

Paperback Mar 2015 274 pages 1st Edition

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Description

If you are a virtualization professional who wants to unleash the power of automation and combat the complexity of sprawling virtual environments, this book is ideal for you. This book will enhance your skills of administering VMware vSphere and vCloud Director with PowerCLI.

What you will learn

Configure and administer VMware ESXi hosts, clusters, and vCenter Manage virtual machine configurations and operations Administer datastores, datastore clusters, and virtual machine snapshots Create and configure virtual networking in a vSphere environment Manage cluster features and affinity groups Make custom reports and notifications from vSphere Direct operations in vCloud Director

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50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

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Chris Wahl Apr 19, 2015

One of the more difficult parts of learning PowerCLI - and PowerShell itself - is determining where to get started. I often suggest identifying a project or task that you want to complete, and then figuring out how to do it, because aimlessly fiddling with a language can be frustrating. If you're looking for a library of sample code that walks you through the why and how, I'd suggest picking up the PowerCLI Cookbook written by Philip Sellers.The book is published through Packt Publishing, who's library contains material that wildly varies across the quality spectrum. However, it is obvious that Philip put a large quantity of time, effort, and care into this book and offers over 200 pages of in-depth discussion and examples for automating a wide swath of data center activities.Each walk-through is arranged into a recipe, containing details on what will be required to follow along with the recipe, steps required to build the code, details on why the code is setup the way it is (and how to modify it for your own purposes). The author has frequently added additional reading to the recipes with blog links, documentation, KBs, and other handy resources.Of note, Philip has built a fairly robust set method for balancing share allocations and resource pools using some of my older work as a baseline. Don't worry, he pinged me about it before it made it into the book, but his approach of using a custom attributes (page 140) is refreshing and looks solid. He even writes a proper function whereas my code was just a spitball idea.There's also an entire section on snapshot management (page 107) with the steps necessary to build a snapshot management module (page 129). I've talked about PowerShell modules recently, and it's spectacular to see examples on building custom modules in this book. Philip offers ideas around naming of snapshots, when to quiesce memory, and how to automate / prune the snapshot lifecycle. This is solid stuff.The last thing I'll compliment is the points in the book where Philip goes a bit out of scope of a straight cookbook. For example, on page 78 there's a decent volume of content covering the use of Get-View and how to view properties and methods. That's some pretty advanced stuff, but the writing breaks it down into meaningful and digestible chunks. Having hit the limitation of the native PowerCLI cmdlets frequently, there's definitely a lot of value in knowing how to leverage methods directly.If you're brand new to PowerCLI, or looking to leverage some polished examples to help tickle the noodle on coding ideas, I'd suggest picking up a copy of PowerCLI Cookbook. I read the whole thing over the course of a few plane flights because it was that good.Note: I requested a review copy of the book from the author which was fulfilled by the publisher.

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Earl Waud Apr 06, 2015

I am a virtualization engineer with 9 years of experience creating automation and administration solutions for large corporations.Last year I was contacted by Packt Publishing and asked if I would be interested in providing technical review services for a new book titled PowerCLI Cookbook. It seemed like an excellent opportunity and I quickly agreed.They sent me a draft copy of the book, one chapter at a time. I would review the chapter content for technical accuracy and test each of the chapter’s code samples and downloadable content, and reply with any corrections, my comments and any feedback. I quickly realized that reading a technical book is a lot different than reviewing a technical book. However I still enjoyed the process as It gave me a chance to use (and expand) my skills in a fun new way.Chapter by chapter, I reviewed the book. I found each chapter to be filled with powerful examples, showing ways to simplify and automate the real tasks that vSphere administrators need to do, the real tasks that I need to do. I finished my review of the last chapter back in early November .Well, Packt has finally published the PowerCLI Cookbook.They wanted to give the author time to validate and update the book’s content to include the vSphere 6 feature set.With a published copy in hand, and based on my detailed review of the book’s content, I can tell you with confidence that Philip Sellers has delivered an excellent resource on PowerCLI, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for such a resource.The book details examples of dozens of highly useful, real world tasks needed for the day-to-day administration of your vSphere environment. The examples are presented in a way that lets your quickly learn to use and adapt them to your needs.Whether you are new to PowerCLI and looking for a book to help you learn and get started, or you are an experienced PowerShell or PowerCLI user looking for a great reference book to help you automate the administration of your virtual environment, you will find this book to be an excellent choice.

R. Hudson Apr 09, 2015

I’m glad I purchased this book! I’ve already found several topics that I’ve needed to get into my production routine. The book is put together very well with straight forward approaches covering what I and many administrators need every day for administration. Scripting and automation are life savers (no longer optional, but required). I believe I’ve already recouped my investment by just using the recipes presented and I’ve only just begun.

Vinay Jun 05, 2015

A great reference book to help you automate the administration of your virtual environment!! Grab it now....

PowerCLI Cookbook: Over 75 step-by-step recipes to put PowerCLI into action for efficient administration of your virtual environment

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