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How to use Chocolatey to install PowerCLI module and connect to your vCenter Server

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In the past, I have published some really useful blog posts for ESXi CLI commands. You were absolutely delighted to find some of those in the past, and going. Those posts are the pillars that I'm building on. So today's post try to add some more ESXi, vCenter CLI commands to the list of the blog posts which has talked about those too – How to use Chocolatey to install PowerCLI and connect to your vCenter Server.

The fact that the blog ages, as well as VMware products, those posts has to be kept updated, and this is really challenging. While one needs to focus on the creation of the new content, the older posts needs to be maintained as well, sometimes.

For those of you who are new to this blog, you should know that this blog runs since over 10 years as a “one-man” IT resource, (https://www.vladan.fr/about/) and that as every IT resource out there, even this one needs to function by paying the bills etc. Your support would be greatly appreciated!

OK let's go. First, I'd like to do a quick recap of what has already been published, so here we go:

VMware CLI Commands posts:

  • ESXi Commands List – Getting started – basic commands (esxcfg-nics, esxcli system, esxcli system version get, esxcli storage…..)
  • ESXi CLI Networking commands – some networking stuff (esxcli network, network nic, network nic list, network vm list, network ip, network vswitch…)
  • ESXi Commands List – Snapshot Deletion Monitoring – snapshots troubleshooting ( ls -al, watch -d ‘ls -luth | grep -E “delta|flat|sesparse”‘, ls -lrth |grep -E “flat|delta|sesparse” )
  • ESXi Commands List – Storage – some multipathing, nmp… –  (esxcli storage nmp device list, esxcli storage core device vaai status get -d <naaID>, esxcli storage core device list -d <naaID>, esxcli storage core path list)
  • How To do a Dry Run of an esxcli Installation or Upgrade on VMware ESXi – this post teaches you that you have a posibility to test istallation/upgrade of ESXi without possibly breaking things, via “esxcli –server=server_name software profile install –dry-run”. It is not an an actual installation/upgrade) only test run, which shows you a large list of vibs and drivers which will be installed, as well as if the final reboot is required (usually yes). Completely at the end, there is also a message which shows which VIBs will be skipped during the process.

How to use Chocolatey to install PowerCLI and connect to your vCenter Server

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you need to have the following:

  • A Windows system with PowerShell 5.1 or higher
  • A vCenter server that you want to connect to
  • Chocolatey, a package manager for Windows, installed on your system.

If you don't have chocolatey installed on your system, there is a one-liner on chocolatey website. Then you can simply go ahead and install VMware PowerCLI.

choco install vmware-powercli-psmodule

After some long list of installations, (note that Dotnet has to be installed and updated as well), you'll finally have the Chocolatey to install PowerCLI and connect to your vCenter Server.

How to use Chocolatey to install PowerCLI and connect to your vCenter Server

and then, if you are using default certificates, you'll like to ignore the errors preventing you to connect via this:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -Confirm:$false

If not we'll have an error saying that the certificate is invalid. We certainly do want the connection without errors, right?

when connecting via

Connect-VIServer -server <ip_of_your_vcenter>

you'll get a windows prompt for user name and password, then the connection to your vCenter server is estabilished.

How to use Chocolatey to install PowerCLI and connect to your vCenter Server

Running Basic Scripting

Once you are connected to the vCenter server, you can use the PowerCLI cmdlets to perform various administration or monitoring tasks on your vSphere environment. For example, you can use the following command to get the list of all virtual machines in your vCenter server:

Get-VM

This will display the information about the virtual machines, such as the name, power state, guest OS, CPU, memory, and disk usage.

You can also use the PowerCLI cmdlets to create, modify, or delete virtual machines, hosts, clusters, datastores, networks, and other vSphere objects. You can also use the powercli cmdlets to perform actions on the vSphere objects, such as starting, stopping, suspending, or migrating virtual machines, or adding, removing, or updating hosts, clusters, datastores, networks, and other vSphere objects.

For more information about the PowerCLI cmdlets, you can use the Get-Help cmdlet to display the help topics for each cmdlet, for example:

Get-Help Get-VM

This will display the help topic for the Get-VM cmdlet, including the syntax, parameters, examples, and related links.

Note: When you run this command for the first time, in the background, it get some latest updated help files.

then only, you'll see the options….

 

Conclusion

VMware PowerCLI is a powerful command-line tool that lets you automate and manage various aspects of your vSphere environment.

In this blog post, I showed you how to connect via VMware PowerCLI to your vCenter server by using chocolatey to install the PowerCLI module on windows system. I hope you found this post useful and learned something new. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below. Thank you for reading!

 

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About Vladan SEGET

This website is maintained by Vladan SEGET. Vladan is as an Independent consultant, professional blogger, vExpert x16, Veeam Vanguard x9, VCAP-DCA/DCD, ESX Virtualization site has started as a simple bookmarking site, but quickly found a large following of readers and subscribers.

Connect on: Facebook. Feel free to network via Twitter @vladan.

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