Beginner looking for advice

[oldarch]

I'm totally unfamiliar with PowerCLI and am looking for some guidance.  I support systems in a QA lab.  I have about 60 systems spread across 4 ESX hosts (some are 4.0, some are 3.5).  I would like to do some automated reporting to aid in monitoring resource utilizations and peformance.  I stumbled across PowrerCLI while Googling for solutions.  From the little that I've read so far, it looks as though PowerCLI will do what I need.  I am fairly competent at scripting, though so far, not with PowerShell.  I'm sure that I can learn to work with PowerShell.

My questions:

1. I also ran across something called VI, which I gather is another script interface, perhaps an older one.  Is that something that I should investigate further?
2. Is there any cost (other than learning time) to PowerCLI?
3. I can view the data currently, using vSphere Client.  I do not, however, have log in permissions to the ESX servers.  Is that a problem?
4. Given my needs and circumstances, if I primarily want to gather disk, memory and cpu utilization and avaialbilty, is PowerCLI the right tool for the job?

I will be grateful for any help in answering these questions or any other suggestions.

[RvdNieuwendijk · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I will try to answer your questions:

1. Afaik VI stands for VMware Infrastructure. This is not a script interface, but it is the old name of VMware vSphere. There are two other VMware supported script interfaces for VMware vSphere besides PowerCLI: "VMware vSphere CLI" and "VMware vCenter Orchestrator". The first is Perl based and a replacement for the ESX service console commands that are gone with ESXi. It will work also on Linux and is a good tool for Linux only shops. The second is a workflow administration tool and comes with VMware vCenter Server. Afaik it is based on Java.
   
2. PowerCLI is free.
   
3. If you have rights on a vCenter Server, you can connect PowerCLI to the vCenter Server. Most of the tasks in PowerCLI you can do with a connection to a vCenter server. There are only a few things you need to do with a direct connection to an ESX server.
   
4. Imho PowerCLI is the right tool for your job.
   

There are lots of example scripts to gather disk, memory and cpu utilization and availabilty on this forum. If you can't find them or have other questions don't hesitate to ask.

Regards, Robert

[LucD]

1. You probably saw a mention to the VI Toolkit, which is the old name of PowerCLI

3. Whatever you can do in the vSphere Client, you can do with PowerCLI.

If you have read permissions on the vSphere client, you can execute all the Get- cmdlets. These are the ones you will need for reporting.

4. All statistical data is retreived through the Get-Stat cmdlet.

If you want to learn the basics about statistical data handling with PowerCLI you can have a look at my Statistics posts.

[oldarch]

Robert and Luc,

Thank you both very much.  Both of your replies are tremendously helpful.  Certainly both are "correct".  This forum, however, permits selecting only one as the "correct" answer, so I chose the first response.

Arch