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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PowerCLI, REST API and a sample module for Tag management

As most of you might know by now, VMware is moving away from SOAP and going to REST API.

Is this something you should know about? Yes, you should!

In a two-part article on TechGenix, I wrote down my thoughts and observations on REST API. The article goes into what this move towards the REST API might mean for you as a scripter/administrator.

 

Since an article on coding, without a coding example doesn’t make much sense, I added a module, named rCisTag on the PowerCLI Examples repository.

Articles

Enjoy reading Part 1, Understanding the VMware REST API interface!

and Part 2, SOAP vs REST for performing tasks in VMware environments.

Search VMTN with REST API

REST API are (nearly) everywhere! VMware’s VMTN website is no exception. I already did a post on Automate Your VMTN Search, but that was entirely based on constructing URI and interpreting the returned webpages. For the occasion of the PowerCLI’s 10th Birthday session at VMworld, I wanted to produce some InfoGraphs on the PowerCLI Community. For those InfoGraphs I needed to harvest data from said VMTN Community, and I looked for a better way to do this. That is where the REST API offered by the Jive software, om which the VMTN website is hosted, came in handy.

The functions I ended up with, are also a good example of how easy it is to consume REST API through PowerShell. And they also show how the basic techniques to work with REST API can be reused. Check out my VMTNRest repo.

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vSphere Automation SDKs, PowerShell and you – Part 1

Yesterday a blog post, named Integration with VMware vSphere using the new Open Sourced Software Development Kits, was published. In my opinion an important milestone on VMware’s Open Source path ! The blog post announced the availability of the first two Open Sourced SDKs made available to the public on GitHub. One for REST and the other for Python.

When we hear REST API, we know it is relatively easy to consume these from a PowerShell script. So power up your labs and follow along on my first steps in my vSphere Audtomation SDK and PowerShell adventure.

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