Learning PowerCLI–What does it take ?

One of the most asked questions to me at VMworld this year was “what does it take to learn PowerCLI”, lots of people have seen the fantastic things you can do with PowerCLI, where it is drawing your infrastructure out into Visio or checking your VMware environment for potential issues.

I always tell people that if I can learn PowerCLI then anyone can, one of the great strengths of PowerCLI and PowerShell is that it was written for System Administrators, for the people who need to get the job done, get it done fast and move on to the next thing.

With that in mind it is not only easy to understand what something like New-VM does but also very easy to learn as all the information you need is often very easy to read, easy to work out what’s going on and also right there in the PowerCLI console.

One of my favorite learning resources is the help built in to PowerCLI.

From within the console you can easily access not only the full help for each cmdlet but also examples of how you might use this cmdlet, these are great because they not only show examples of how to use the cmdlets but also cover some of the top use cases for that cmdlet.  A great deal of thought goes into the help files and these examples to make them relevant and useful.

To access the help and the examples for a cmdlet there are multiple ways, firstly you can see the help as part of the online documentation for PowerCLI here, secondly you can run the Get-Help cmdlet and also use the –examples parameter to gain more information, see below for an example:

PowerCLI Example

I still don’t understand what it takes to learn PowerCLI ?!

If you still don’t get it and need a full on action video with cool music and stunts to get this simple feature then check out the below:

What does it take to learn PowerCLI ? from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.