Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language for administrators is really taking off in the VMware world. I first got my hands on the technology while at VMworld Europe 2008 at one of the hands-on lab sessions. VMware's Carter Shanklin was a big help during the conference -- he walked me through part of the lab exercise and explained some of these foreign concepts to me. I immediately saw the value in PowerShell scripting, and I was only a few minutes into the lab.
Programming, scripting, and development within the VMware environment are becoming so much easier. In the early years, we had PERL and command-line entries that we could perform in the console. My how times have changed!
Since that time, things have progressed a great deal. Last month, VMware launched the VI Toolkit for Windows, which provides a powerful yet simple command-line interface for task-based management of the VMware Infrastructure platform. Windows administrators can easily manage and deploy the VMware Infrastructure with a familiar, simple-to-use command-line interface.
To help you on your VI Toolkit journey, here are a few more pieces to the puzzle.
VMware has created the Developer's Guide for VMware Infrastructure .Net Toolkit 1.0. It provides information about setting up the development environment and developing applications using the VMware Infrastructure .Net Toolkit 1.0. VMware provides several different SDK products, each of which targets different developer communities and target platforms. This guide is intended for developers who are creating applications for managing VMware infrastructure components.
It states the scope of the work as the following:
The VMware Infrastructure .Net Toolkit is a client-side framework from VMware that simplifies the programming effort associated with the VMware Infrastructure API and server-side object model. It is a part of the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows), which provides easy-to-use C# and PowerShell interface to VMware Infrastructure APIs. Using VI .Net Toolkit you can create, customize, or manage VMware Infrastructure inventory objects using VI API calls.
You can download this 20-page developer's guide from VMware.
Carter Shanklin has also shared a couple of slides on the VI Toolkit. The slideshow shows you one way of simplifying .Net development for VMware VI using the VI Toolkit (for Windows).
Check out the VI Toolkit slideshow presentation.
Another new tool that can help out with your scripting projects is called PowerGUI. And according to a recent post on VMware's PowerShell blog site, you can now run the PowerGUI Console and the PowerGUI Script Editor directly inside the VI Client. So now, things have been made even easier. VMware said you can now launch the PowerGUI Script Editor, with all of the syntax highlighting, tab completion, and debugging features you love without having to bother with a separate login.
Good hunting and happy scripting!
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