A Hitchhikers Guide to SRS 1.0.0

Sometimes announcements tend to disappear in the cracks of time. When the Script Runtime Service for vSphere (SRS) 1.0.0 was announced, I had the feeling just that happened.

When version 1.0.0 of this open-sourced (!) product was released, I had expected much more buzz on social media from VMware PowerCLI users. 

This appliance does in fact bring an answer to a wish that many PowerShell/PowerCLI users have had for years: a “Scripting Host“!

This Hitchhikers Guide to SRS 1.0.0 post will show how I build my own customised SRS appliance, and how I use it to run PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts.

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Cloud-init – Part 5 – Running Containers

In this last part of this series (for now) we will show how to use containers to run your PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts on the deployed instances. And although technically not a ‘real‘ cloud-init post, I consider it related to Part 1Part 2 and Part3 in this series. 

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Cloud-init – Part 4 – Running Scripts

For now, the second to last part in this series. And although technically not a ‘realcloud-init post, I consider it related to Part 1, Part 2 and Part3 in this series. In this post I’ll show how you can run scripts on these ‘cattle‘ stations we just deployed.

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Cloud-init – Part 3 – Photon OS

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series we used Ubuntu as the guest OS of our target instances. In Part 3 we will show how to use VMware’s Photon OS as our guest OS.

The main reason to use Photon OS is that it is open-sourced, it has a small footprint and it is optimised for VMware vSphere.

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Cloud-init – Part 2 – Advanced Ubuntu

In Cloud-init – Part 1 – The Basics, we laid the groundwork for using cloud-init in a vSphere environment. In this post we will go into more advanced Ubuntu setups. This includes deploying PowerShell, v6 and v7, using repositories and if needed, a GUI with Visual Studio Code.

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Cloud-init – Part 1 – The Basics

One of the important DevOps adagios in my book is “Treat your servers as cattle, not as pets”. Meaning that you roll out your stations when you need them, use them and throw them away after you used them. This series of posts will document one such way of deploying such ‘cattle’ stations. The method is named cloud-init.

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In this first part, we will introduce cloud-init and how you can use it from your PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts. Since the Ubuntu distribution is very popular, on-premises and in the cloud, this introduction will focus on that distro to demonstrate the concept. In the following parts, we will tackle Photon, containers and how to run your scripts on these stations.

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