On July 25 VMware releases the RTM of its new Powershell-powered toolkit for VirtualCenter, in beta since March.
The words that VMware spent to describe it are remarkable:
I think I’ve made it clear that I believe the VI Toolkit (for Windows) is one of the most powerful tools VMware has ever made for VI admins. It’s designed at just the right level of abstraction that lets a VI admin carry out commands with a very natural syntax — the commands and objects you want are just right there. It’s built on a technology (PowerShell) that is a damn powerful scripting language that lets you pipe objects between scripts, er, cmdlets…
and give a huge credit to Microsoft, which invented the Powershell language and built its System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) on top of it.
Microsoft SCVMM and VMware VirtualCenter are competing products but they now share the same scripting language: customers may wonder if the wonderful things that Powershell allows to do on VirtualCenter can be replicated on SCVMM.
VMware is further encouraging such kind of questions by launching an interesting contest.
The company will award three submitted scripts that can match three simple criteria:
- Time saved, demonstrate how your script solves a real problem and reduces administration effort and time
- Usefulness of script – how broadly applicable is your script to other VI administrators?
- Simplicity, elegance of script
We wonder if anybody can win the contest with a script that works both on VirtualCenter and on SCVMM.
Download the VI Toolkit 1.0 for Windows here.