Why vEcoShell or PowerGUI makes sense

A little while back I started a PowerPack which could be used in either PowerGUI or vEcoShell – the application formerly known as “The Virtualisation EcoShell or VESI, my PowerPack was a collection of the most used scripts from my site all laid out in a nice GUI format.

Now why would you put a GUI back on top of the scripting, lets think about this…

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At the moment when you are using the vSphere client to update your virtual infrastructure it is as slow as the human that is driving it, if you want to create 10 virtual machines you will need to click over 50 times (roughly 5 times per VM) and also type the names in etc etc.

If we were to use PowerCLI to do this then we could do it in one-line:

Foreach ($i in 1..10) { Get-VMHost ESX01.virtual.net | New-VM -Name "Newvm$i” -DiskMB 1024 -MemoryMB 512 } 

The difference here is not what it is doing as it is still creating 10 VMs, still connecting to the same vCenter and still using the same API’s as the client its just an automated way of making the call, a programmatic way of sending many calls down the same line to the vCenter.

So why would we use vEcoShell or PowerGUI ?

Well believe it or not coding doesn’t come easy to some people, yeah I know its hard to grasp isnt it !

At the end of the day we all want the benefits of PowerCLI, we love the fact that it makes things easier but not all of us have the time or the mind set to be able to sit down and write a script to automate what they need, of course with such a great book coming out in the future these people will realise just how easy it can be to do this but in the meantime that’s where I see vEcoShell or PowerGUI fitting in, it not only allows me (and other script writers) to share the scripts we have written in a nice easy GUI format with the script still available to browse but also it helps beginners use the same tools the advanced scripter’s would use in a nice easy point and click fashion.

If you haven’t tried vEcoShell or PowerGUI, I would head straight over to there sites and download the free products, its amazing the amount of time you will save and for no cost !

Extended with the VMware Community PowerPack (more to come on this) you will have all the common issues and pain point areas in one management area, for example…

List all VM’s disk partitions and sizes and export them to many formats to forward them on….

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Or backup all your ESXi hosts configuration in one click:

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Plus much much more, and remember its FREE !

One thought on “Why vEcoShell or PowerGUI makes sense

  1. Pingback: The best of both worlds « Dmitry’s PowerBlog: PowerShell and beyond

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