As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!“, Alan and myself started writing a PowerCLI book.
At about the same time Alan got the once-in-a-lifetime oppurtunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist.
Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free! Alan has been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and traveling all over the globe. The little time he was at home, went of course in the first place to his loved ones.
As a consequence, our chapter-writing schedule failed misserably.
So we decided to get some extra help for the book in order to keep our deadline.
And now, for the proverbial “silver lining”, have a look who agreed to help us out:
| Glenn Sizemore |
Jonathan Medd |
Arnim van Lieshout |
|
Winner of the
Scripting Games 2010
vExpert
|
PowerShell MVP
|
vExpert
|
|
|
 |
 |
In other words, the book will now be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” !
Can’t wait to read it 
One of the new features that came with vSphere 4.1 was the ability to use Active Directory Authentication on ESX(i) servers for permissions, console access and ssh access.This is a great feature that you will probably want to activate on all your ESX(i) servers.
Unfortunately this new feature is not available in PowerCLI 4.1. That means you can’t set this up in your configuration scripts through a PowerCLI cmdlet. In most such cases you can fall back on one of the SDK APIs to bypass this lack of a cmdlet. But unfortunately the new “managers”, of which HostActiveDirectoryAuthentication is one, are not available in the VMware.Vim assembly either.
Rob raised this in a recent PowerCLI Community thread. Yasen, one of the PowerCLI Dev Team members, provided a bypass. To make this bypass a bit more accessible, I decided to roll it up in a PowerShell function.
Read more…
In the new PowerCLI 4.1 build 264274 there are two new cmdlets, called New-VIProperty and Remove-VIProperty, that deserve your special attention.
The New-VIProperty cmdlet allows you to add a new properties to any PowerCLI object (InventoryItem, HostSystem, VirtualMachine…). And it’s up to you to define what the value of this new property will !
The Remove-VIProperty cmdlet allows you to remove such a new property.
These new cmdlets, combined with the new Extension property, will change several of the well established ways that you use in your PowerCLI scripts. And besides adding a lot of flexibility, the extension property will make your scripts considerably faster (if used wisely).
Read more…
