Hi,
I agree with you in the context of the PowerShell tools on vSphere, but have you looked into something like Terraform to provide infrastructure as code? The tasks you want to accomplish have an easier workflow in something like Terraform than in PowerShell in my opinion, although these days I don't go near ESX and do everything in the cloud, so there may be some annoying features using the vSphere provider.
In terms of the console access any CLI tool is going to struggle with this, however it can be worked round. In the case of Azure VMs I have VM extensions that write out files to a storage account which I can view, and I have also done a solution which ran a DSC job on the host as part of the provisioning and the deployment job didn't finish until the DSC job had completed. I realise again this is very cloud based and I don't know how the APIs work on the vSphere side so experimentation may be required there.
In my view one problem with the PowerShell tools for a lot of these platforms is it gives you current status on an action, and there are tools to perform specific actions, but it isn't declarative in that you give it an end goal and it will not know how to get there. The magic in something like Terraform (and the cloud specific stack languages) is that it knows dependencies between the different components so can work out the order to run transactions.
I wasn't going to reply to this thread as I didn't really have anything constructive to write, but hopefully this may have given you something to look into.
Andrew.
________________________________________
From: Darragh Ó Héiligh [d@digitaldarragh.com]
Sent: 23 October 2019 09:07
To: Blind sysadmins list
Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Re: VSphere.
Kelly,
Thanks.
But power shell scripts have limitations.
Take for example the following sequence of tasks.
1. Create VM from template.
2. Modify that VM using a wizard to modify the host name, IP address, time zone etc.
3. Wait for it to provision.
4. Monitor the status of the provision task.
5. Change the VM to use a different VSwitch.
6. Verify the amount of RAM and CPU cores.
7. Move to the networks tab and verify the VLAN ID for the network you have chosen.
8. Power on the VM
9. Open the console.
10. Use OCR either using Jaws or something like Seeing AI to determine when the template work flow has added the machine to the domain etc.
All of these tasks with power shell only would take a lot more time. Sure, if it was a defined workflow or a commonly required task, power shell would be fine. But I'm not sold on it's advantages over a good GUI for day to day administrative tasks with different requirements.
I'm open to correction though but specific examples of your requirements and how you accomplish these efficiently would be very appreciated.
I'm aware of the advantages of power shell. I use it daily but almost always for repeated tasks. Even for an extremely fast typist, I find power shell to be les efficient than a GUI for one off tasks. Also, information such as the status of background jobs, dependencies etc must besought. It is not there for easy retrieval.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kelly Prescott
Hello,
Is there anyone on this list working with VSphere or dabbling from time to time?
I'm still using the installed client but that is fast being removed.
Last time I looked at the HTML5 interface, it wasn't great. So I'm wondering if there have been any improvements and / or is there anyone engaging with VMware?
I don't have any contacts with VMware at the moment. So I cant push any questions any further than standard support channels.
Please don't recommend power shell as an administration tool, this isn't currently viable for my needs.
Thanks
Darragh _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list -- blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org To unsubscribe send an email to blind-sysadmins-leave@lists.hodgsonfamily.org
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