PowerCLI - introduction

VMware first introduced PowerCLI in September 2008 as a way to manage ESX 3.0 and vCenter 2.5, using a Shell by leveraging the scripting capabilities of PowerShell. In these nearly 10 years, VMware PowerCLI has grown to become a very powerful management and automation tool for vSphere, vCloud, vRealize Operations Manager, and VMware Horizon, with over 500 cmdlets.

There are many tasks, for example, finding snapshots for VMs, that are very tedious in vSphere Web Client but can be easily performed using a single line with the PowerCLI script. Whether you're installing a native instance of PowerCLI on your Windows workstation or server or running an instance of PowerCLI Core using Docker, managing a VMware infrastructure has never been easier.

In the following recipe, we will install PowerCLI on a Windows 10 workstation and connect it to our vCenter server...