VMworld 2012: INF-VSP1252: What’s New with vSphere 5.1 – ESXCLI & PowerCLI

VMworld 2012: INF-VSP1252: What’s New with vSphere 5.1 – ESXCLI & PowerCLI

Session abstract

In this session Technical Marketing automation experts William Lam and Alan Renouf will take you through What’s New in ESXCLI and PowerCLI for the vSphere 5.1 release. In this session Alan and William will take you through the exciting features available to use when automating VMware products, both beginners and experts will learn how to use new features to make your life easier and more productive.

The session

The session was split into 2 parts, first William talked about (some of) the new ESXCLI functions and improvements with demo’s. First of all ESXCLI 5.1 still works with vSphere 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0.

There are 82 new commands in the new release:

  • 7 hardware
  • 2 sched
  • 47 network
  • 15 storage
  • 11 system

One of the best things in my opinion is SNMP support which got improved. Furthermore William showed some demo’s about several commands like:

  • Host maintenance operations
  • Network coredump check improvement
  • SR-IOV configurations
  • Network statistics and monitoring
  • SSD monitoring

There are quite some new operations and showing them all would probably take a while :-).

Next up was Alan who talked about the PowerCLI. He started with a small overview on what PowerCLI is. PowerCLI is a free product containing over 300 cmdlets (PowerShell Commands) to use. They can manage every aspect of your VMware environment and it is integrated into PowerShell.

PowerCLI 5.1 is backwards compatible all the way down till ESX 4.0 and Virtual Center 4.0!

PowerCLI has several snap-in’s:

  • Core: managing vSphere
  • Image Builder: working with Image Profiles
  • Auto Deploy: deploy ESXi using PXE
  • License: work with vSphere Licensing
  • Cloud: vCloud Director Providers
  • Tenant (NEW!): vCloud Director Tenants

We then received some information on each part with the “what’s new” list and finally information regarding the Tenant Snap-in.

There are 361 cmdlets in PowerCLI for Admins and 56 cmdlets for Tenants!

In the end we saw a new “cool demo” which will be released into a fling. This basicly deployed a full vCloud in a few minutes. I can’t wait till they release this and I will sure be posting about it when it gets released!

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Niels Engelen
Working as a Principal Analyst in Product Management for Veeam Software with an interest in anything virtual and cloud with a strong focus on AWS, Azure and Microsoft 365. He is also a VMware Certified Professional, a Veeam Certified Architect and gained the VMware vExpert award (2012-2022).
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