VM-Aware

Here’s an interesting little piece comparing Microsoft’s PowerShell to good old Bash.

It is as non-biased as I have seen these comparisons be and it does a good job of pointing out the major difference, PowerShell is object-oriented and Bash isn’t. I don’t think that this in itself is reason enough to consider one better than the other, but it does mean that PowerShell can have a very steep learning curve whilst overall being more powerful.

It is an interesting PDF so have a look if you get chance.

I found a bunch of great cmdlets that have now been bundled into the free Quest ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory package.  They include:

• Add-QADPermission
• Get-QADObjectSecurity
• Get-QADPermission
• Get-QADRootDSE
• Get-QARSAccessTemplate
• Get-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• New-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• Remove-QADPermission
• Remove-QARSAccessTemplateLink
• Set-QADObjectSecurity
• Set-QARSAccessTemplateLink

These helped no end in the management of AD permissions with PowerShell.  I found the original post discussing the package here, but you can download the Quest AD cmdlets here completely free of charge.

For those of you that are interested in PowerShell to the point that you’d be curious as a possible release date then Jeffrey Snover may be your man.

A blog post of his indicates that v2 is feature complete and although he cannot explicitly mention a release date he intimates that mid 2009 is a good guess.

I think PowerShell is the best thing that Microsoft have done for many a year so I’m pretty excited by a big feature update.

I don’t know about you, but not being a programmer means I sometimes struggle with some of the concepts. I hope you find this article by Jeffry Snover over at the MSDN PowerShell blog as useful as me.

It gives a very nice analogy of how you can equate objects and their functions to riding a bike.

Nice and simple, just how I like my explanations.

I try not to use the word legend too often, but Carter Shanklin my friend you are a legend.  Powershell is great, Excel is great and VMware is even greater, put them all together and you have something special.

Carter has written a number of Powershell cmdlets that have been given fantastic Excel frontends for completing VMware configuration tasks.

From the mundane to the curious Carter has created a group of spreadsheets that have made my life a whole lot easier:

• Create Virtual Switches - Multi-sheet spreadsheet for highly configurable cmdlet
• Reconnecting ESX Hosts in Virtual Center - Perfect after connecting to a different VC
• Creating lots of VMs at once - Does exactly what it says on the tin

Carter, thank you and I mean that!

I found a fantastic reference card/cheat sheet relating to Powershell over at DZone.com.  I was looking for a succinct and clear breakdown of syntax, variable usage, cmdlets etc and it can all be found in this little beauty of a pdf.

This comes in handy for anybody that is investigating the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit.