Hal Rottenberg

Checking out PowerWF

Screenshot of PowerWF

In case you haven’t heard, a little company called Devfarm Software has been working on a product called PowerWF (pictured, right). They had a great demo at VMworld 2009, and I was so impressed that I gave them five minutes at the end of my own breakout session to do a demo for my audience.

I’m a big PowerShell and PowerCLI nut, so why do I care about some graphical user interface (GUI) application? Well, there are two answers to that. One, PowerShell is an automation engine, not just the command-line shell. There are plenty of tools out there which use PowerShell behind the scenes to enable the user to automate tasks. Exchange 2007’s admin console and VESI (which I need to spend some time talking about soon) are just two examples. Just because I like to write scripts doesn’t mean I don’t respect the GUI. Continued »

The vSphere API is not just for programmers

The topic of the VMworld 2009 session which Luc Dekens and I gave recently was how to take PowerCLI to the next level. I’ll explain that premise for a bit in this post for those who may not have been able to make it to the session (or the show, for that matter).

PowerCLI has a lot of functionality built in. As of this writing, there are 165 cmdlets that let you do a wide range of tasks such as starting virtual machines or creating virtual switches. Cmdlets are great because they are high-level, task-based, and their usage is mostly consistent across all domains, whether you are talking about virtualization or managing your mail servers.

Here’s a PowerShell command which will display all of the various types of objects which you can manipulate with PowerCLI. Continued »