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.

The second answer is that PowerWF is sort of like scripting with Visio diagrams. At its heart is the concept of a workflow. A workflow is a graphical representation of a series of steps which belong to a task which you want to automate. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of these steps available. They arranged on the left of the window in a palette with several collapsible headings such as FlowControl, Visualization, and of course, VMware PowerCLI.

Yeah, now you can see where I’m going. The Devfarm guys have been doing VMware solutions for a while, so it is natural that their workflow tool integrates very heavily with VMware’s products. In fact, you can do stuff with VIX, not just PowerCLI, so that opens some possibilities for you guys using that API to automate VMs and guests.

Anyway, I’ve been really vague so far, so I feel the need to give some concrete examples of what the heck PowerWF can do. I have to admit that I’m still a newbie with it, so I’m going to cheat here and point you to some videos that the Devfarm guys made:

• Transcribing PowerShell scripts as Worfklows
• Convert PowerShell/PowerCLI to Workflow

PowerWF is really, really big. I mean, it can do a lot of stuff. It can cover most any task that you would do with PowerCLI. It can run PowerShell scripts. It can output information in a variety of ways, such as console, text file, RSS feed, HTML, or datagrid. It can also do some really interesting things I haven’t even fully grokked yet such as create WMI classes and Web services.

In order to help you get started working with PowerWF you may want to check out these blog posts that the team is working on:

• What is a Workflow Anyway?
• PowerWF Layout and Terminology

As I said, I’m just getting started with the application myself, so I’ll try to report back to the blog with my findings as I get deeper into the product.

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. As you can see from the output, the scope is pretty broad:

PS > Get-VICommand | sort noun | group noun | Format-Wide name

CDDrive Cluster

CustomField Datacenter

Datastore DrsRule

FloppyDrive Folder

HardDisk Inventory

Log LogType

NetworkAdapter OSCustomizationSpec

ResourcePool ScsiLun

ScsiLunPath Snapshot

Stat StatInterval

StatType Task

Template Tools

VICredentialStoreItem VIEvent

View VIObjectByVIView

VirtualPortGroup VirtualSwitch

VIServer VIToolkitConfiguration

VIToolkitVersion VM

VMGuest VMHost

VMHostAccount VMHostAdvancedConfiguration

VMHostDiagnosticPartition VMHostFirewallDefaultPolicy

VMHostFirewallException VMHostFirmware

VMHostModule VMHostNetwork

VMHostNetworkAdapter VMHostNtpServer

VMHostProfile VMHostProfileCompliance

VMHostService VMHostSnmp

VMHostStartPolicy VMHostStorage

VMHostSysLogServer VMResourceConfiguration

VMScript VMStartPolicy

Even so, the vSphere application programming interface (API) is so large that there are still an astonishing number of things which are not handled by the existing set of cmdlets. Sure, VMware continues to work on this toolkit and to expand its capabilities — the rumor is that over 200 cmdlets will ship with version 4.1 — but the team that works on PowerShell is limited by time and resources, so it’s doubtful that they’ll reach parity with the API anytime soon.

Luckily, there is a release valve — a hidden door, if you like, that will let you go behind the scenes to go where no VMware Infrastructure (oops, meant to say vSphere) admin has gone before. The name of that hidden door is the Get-View cmdlet. “Get” in the PowerShell world just means to retrieve an object from somewhere. But what is it really that you are getting? You are getting an unfiltered view of the “managed objects” which make up the heart of the API. Once you have that view, you can do anything you want which the underlying API supports.

Here is a quick example of the sort of cool things you can see with Get-View:

PS > $h = Get-VMHost | Get-View

PS > $h.Summary.Config.Product

Name : VMware ESX

FullName : VMware ESX 4.0.0 build-164009

Vendor : VMware, Inc.

Version : 4.0.0

Build : 164009

LocaleVersion : INTL

LocaleBuild : 000

OsType : vmnix-x86

ProductLineId : esx

ApiType : HostAgent

ApiVersion : 4.0

InstanceUuid :

LicenseProductName : VMware ESX Server

LicenseProductVersion : 4.0

DynamicType :

DynamicProperty :

And now you know how to write a script to make sure your host servers are all on the same patch level!