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PowerCLI Core is now available on Docker Hub!

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The much anticipated PowerCLI Core was just released this week as a VMware Fling which allows you to run PowerCLI on Linux, Mac OS X or even as a Docker Container. This is HUGE if you ask me, especially for customers who would like the benefits of PowerCLI and not be forced to use a Windows system which it traditionally had required.

I personally have been using PowerCLI Core for quite some time now on my Mac OS X and the experience is exactly the same as you would find it on its Windows counterpart. The Docker Container is also a another great way to consume PowerCLI Core and I also use that quite frequently as well. One thing I felt that would make the Docker Container even easier to consume for those looking to do something really quick in PowerCLI or what I call "Just In time PowerCLI access" is to be able to quickly pull it down from Docker Hub rather than having to download bunch some files and then manually build it yourself (not that it is complicated) but sometimes speed is the game.

I had posted a tweet earlier this morning and literally a few hours later, my good friend Alan Renouf delivered the goods! In addition, you will also find that the new version of PowerCLI Core Docker Container is now using Photon OS image rather than Ubuntu as it previously did.

In addition to the three methods of consuming PowerCLI Core, you also now find it hosted on Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/vmware/powerclicore/

UPDATE (01/03/17) - It looks like PowerNSX is now also included with PowerCLI Core. To use PowerNSX, simply import it by running the following command: Import-Module PowerNSX and you will now have access to the PowerNSX cmdlets! Nice job to the PowerNSX guys for making this possible for our customers!

To access PowerCLI Core from Docker Hub, you simply just need a system installed with the Docker Client (Windows, Linux or Mac OS X) running or you can even use VMware's Photon OS which comes with Docker by default and following the instructions below:

Step 1 - Pull the PowerCLI Core image from Docker Hub by running the following command:

docker pull vmware/powerclicore

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Step 2 - Run the PowerCLI Core Docker Container by running the following command:

docker run --rm -it --entrypoint='/usr/bin/powershell' vmware/powerclicore

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It is literally that easy to access PowerCLI from ANY platform at ANY time! 😀

Step 3 - If you are using a self-signed certificate, you will need to run the following command below before you can call the Connect-VIServer cmdlet:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -Confirm:$false

How to tell if an ESXi host is a VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance programmatically?

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I had received this question awhile back but I was only able to get to it recently. If you are not familiar with the VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance and its purpose, Cormac Hogan did an excellent write-up on the topic which you can find it here.

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The reason this question came up was that if you were to simply iterate over all ESXi hosts within your vSphere Inventory from an Automation standpoint, you might find a mix of regular ESXi hosts and potentially this new VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance which is basically an ESXi host that runs in a VM (e.g. Nested ESXi). Although, it may look and feel like a regular ESXi host, it is not and the question was how might you go about distinguishing between the two? You can of course setup specific naming standards, folder structure or separate datacenter objects, but you still may accidentally retrieve a VSAN Witness host without even realizing it.

One quick solution is to check for a specific ESXi Advanced Setting called Misc.vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance which will return a value of 1 if it is the VSAN Witness Appliance. Here is a quick PowerCLI snippet which demonstrates how you can access this property:

$vmhost = Get-VMHost -Name 192.168.1.115
Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vmhost -Name Misc.vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance

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Although the method described above is one quick way to easily identify whether an ESXi host is a VSAN Witness Appliance, it is also limited in the information that it provides you. Another approach is to actually use the new VSAN 6.2 Management API and specifically the Stretched Clustering System APIs to retrieve the associated VSAN Witness host for a given VSAN Cluster. Not only will you get more information about the specific ESXi host providing the VSAN Witness functionality which will allow you to correlate back to your vSphere Inventory, but you will also get additional VSAN Witness configuration such as the preferred Fault Domain, Node UUID and the VSAN Cluster that it is associated with for example.

Here is a quick VSAN Management SDK for Python sample script that I had created called vsan-stretched-cluster-system-sample.py which implements the VSANVcGetWitnessHosts() API method. The script prints out a few of the WitnessHostInfo properties as shown in the screenshot below.

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One other option is if you simply just want to know if a given ESXI host is a VSAN Witness host or not, there is also the VSANVcIsWitnessHost() API that simply returns a boolean value. This might useful if you just have a list of ESXi hosts retrieved through the vSphere API and no knowledge of the underlying VSAN Clusters.

VMware PowerCLI for Mac OS X, Linux & More? Yes, please!

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powercli_for_mac_osx_linux_1There were a several announcements at last weeks VMworld US Conference, but one of the most exciting piece of news in my opinion was from Alan Renouf, Product Manager for all things API/SDK/CLI at VMware. During Alan's What's New PowerCLI session, he announced that PowerCLI is finally coming to both Mac OS X as well as Linux! As you can imagine, the news was very well received from customers and partners. In fact, after I had tweeted the update here & here, I literally had folks pinging/IM'ing/DM'ing me non-stop about when they could get access 🙂

UPDATE (10/18/16) - PowerCLI Multi-Platform (MP) for Linux and Mac OS X has now been released as a VMware Fling. Please find the download here and provide any feedback in the comments section.

This exciting update was only possible with the help of our friends over at Microsoft who had recently open sourced both .NET Core & PowerShell. Once that news broke, Alan and the PowerCLI Engineering team have been working hard on porting over the existing PowerCLI code which uses the Windows .NET library over to the new .NET Core which is now open sourced. I have been very impressed at how fast the PowerCLI team have already made available many of the default cmdlets as well as the Get View cmdlet which exposes the entire functionality of the vSphere API.

Now, before you get too excited, this new version of PowerCLI is currently not available yet. As Alan mentioned in his session, we plan to release an early Tech Preview of PowerCLI for both Mac OS X and Linux as a VMware Fling shortly after VMworld. It is also very important to note that Microsoft PowerShell for Mac OS X & Linux which PowerCLI uses is just at an Alpha release milestone. There is still much work to do on both sides but I am really looking forward to enabling our customers with the choice of platform when it comes to consuming PowerCLI.

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A few of us have been quite fortunate to have been involved in the early development of this new version of PowerCLI. In fact, we even built a simple Docker Container for PowerCLI which will allow you to easily access PowerCLI from any system that can run Docker. Here is a quick screenshot of spinning up a PowerCLI Docker Container which will also be part of the Fling release.

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Lastly, we want customers to be able to quickly and securely set up a persistent PowerCLI environment in which they can use to manage and configure their VMware-based products that support PowerCLI. With that, we have also built a PowerShell package for Photon OS which is VMware's minimal Linux container host distribution. Not only is it free to download and use, but it literally takes a few seconds to install (tdnf -y install powershell) and even less time to boot up and import the PowerCLI module. This was literally done the week before VMworld by the Photon team and huge kudos for their support! As you can see, not only do we want to provide choice for our customers but also simplifying how you might consume PowerCLI whether its natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Docker Container or running on top of VMware Photon OS. I hope you are excited as I am and stay tuned for more details on the Fling release!

If you have any feedback or what you are most excited regarding this news, please leave a comment and I will make sure it makes it way back to our Product Manager.