Getting started
As an administrator, the desire is to produce reports on current system performance and configuration. Perhaps an audit of the drift of such systems is the typical use case that explains why PowerCLI has been downloaded in the first place. Most individuals start by downloading someone else's script and attempting to run it in the environment. This chapter deals with that—pinpointing safe and viable scripts to run within your environment.
Where do we begin?
One key tool that can be used to begin to understand the capabilities of scripting is RVTools (at www.robware.net), which provides a quick report of almost everything in the Virtual Environment. This truly is a fantastic example of what information can be garnished from a running vSphere/vCenter instance. It uses the proper Software Developers Kit (SDK) and the .NET framework to pull the information into a CSV file.
A PoSH-centric file named vCheck, originally started by the author of www.virtual.net, Alan Renouf, has blossomed...
