Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Automating VMware vSphere
The role of a VMware vSphere administrator has become increasingly more demanding as the
features and capabilities of vSphere have increased in both quantity and quality. VMware has
done a great job of making these features quickly consumable for an administrator, as you have
seen throughout this topic. However, these new features lead to additional responsibilities, more
opportunities for error and inconsistency, and lower tolerances for outages as more critical and
complex workloads can be, and are, virtualized.
As a vSphere administrator, you will need to perform many repetitive tasks with increas-
ingly more touch points. Examples include creating multiple VMs from a template, changing
the network coni guration on all VMs or ESXi hosts, migrating VMs to new datastores with
Storage vMotion, and gathering considerable information about the environment for internal
and external audits. Automation can help you complete these task more quickly, provide greater
consistency, and ultimately save your organization money through reduced risk of errors and
unplanned outages. Clearly, automation is an area that can benei t every administrator and
every organization that adopts vSphere in their environment. This benei t can be realized
regardless of scale or previous experience.
In this chapter, you will learn to
Identify tools available for automating vSphere
Create a PowerCLI script for automation
Use vCLI to manage ESXi hosts from the command line
Use vCenter in combination with vMA to manage all of your hosts
Employ the Perl toolkit and VMware SDK for virtual server operations from the
command line
Coni gure vCenter Orchestrator
Use a vCenter Orchestrator workl ow
Why Use Automation?
This question comes up time and again, and over the years we have narrowed it down to a very
simple reason. You are only one person. An individual is capable of performing only a i nite
amount of work manually in any given hour, day, or week. Automation tools allow the adminis-
trator the ability to increase their efi ciency, accuracy, and capacity.
 
 
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