I still talk to people who are reluctant to jump in and learn some basic scripting techniques. Usually their response is that it’s easy in the gui or “scripting is hard” or the “I’m not a developer so why bother ?”. Meh, make it happen.
The facts is, learning some basic scripting techniques will save you considerable time and open up new opprtunities to increase your efficiency. The techniques are transferrable to all aspects of ICT.
Here’s a “real-life” basic example. I had the task this week to introduce another vlan into a VDI environment. This environment does not use a DVS. Easy job: Hosts & Clusters, find a host, Configuration, Network, Properties etc etc. This probably amounts to a 2 -3 minute job per host. Problem is, there’s 21 hosts to do.
So realistically that’s up to 60 minutes + of mind numbing clickery to look forward to, with a high risk of entering something wrong during the process.
Or……… Do it in less than 45 seconds with a PowerCLI one liner. Consistently and easily. Then get on doing fun, but more importantly, valuable things. Here’s how;
For a single Cluster;
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1 |
Get-Cluster clustername | Get-VMHost | Get-VirtualSwitch -Name yourvSwitchName | New-VirtualPortGroup -Name NewPortGroupName -VlanID newvlanid |
For multiple Clusters;
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1 2 3 |
$clusters = @("Cluster1","Cluster2") ForEach ($cluster in $clusters) { Get-Cluster $cluster | Get-VMHost | Get-VirtualSwitch -Name yourvSwitchName | New-VirtualPortGroup -Name NewPortGroupName -VlanID newvlanid } |
In Action;
The processing time is ~ 2 seconds per host. and when this was executed, they were busy.
This is a very simple example, but there are so many ways you can benefit from this approach. So if you’re not scripting, what the hell are you waiting for ?
More.to.come so stay tuned.