PowerCLI Module For VMware Cloud Foundation: Introduction

As you are no doubt aware I am a fan of PowerShell and PowerCLI. Since my early days working with VMware products, whether it was vCenter, vCloud Director or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), I have always leveraged PowerCLI to get the job done. Up until recently, there was no native PowerCLI support for the VMware Cloud Foundation API. Hence why I started the open-source PowerVCF project almost 5 years ago! PowerVCF has grown and matured as new maintainers came onboard. Open-source projects are a great way to deliver functionality to our customers that is not yet available in officially supported channels. Since the release of PowerCLI 13.1 I am delighted to say that we now have officially supported, native PowerCLI modules for VMware Cloud Foundation.

2 distinct modules are now part of PowerCLI. One for the Cloud Builder API and one for the SDDC Manager API.

Install-Module -Name VMware.Sdk.Vcf.CloudBuilder
Install-Module -Name VMware.Sdk.Vcf.SddcManager

The cmdlets for each module are too many to list here but to see what’s available once you have them installed do the following

get-command -module VMware.Sdk.Vcf.CloudBuilder
get-command -module VMware.Sdk.Vcf.SDDCManager

You will see from the output that the cmdlets are broken into primarily 2 types:

• Initialize-Vcf<xyz>
  • Used to gather information and generate input specs
• Invoke-Vcf<xyz>
  • Used to execute the API request with an input spec

Each module also has a connect/disconnect cmdlet which can be used in the following way

Connect-VcfCloudBuilderServer -Server sfo-cb01.sfo.rainpole.io -User admin -Password VMw@re1!VMw@re1!

This connection object is then stored in $defaultCloudBuilderConnections

Connect-VcfSddcManagerServer -Server sfo-vcf01.sfo.rainpole.io -User administrator@vsphere.local -Password VMw@re1!VMw@re1!

This connection object is then stored in $defaultsddcManagerConnections

Note: If you are working in a lab environment with untrusted certs you can pass -IgnoreInvalidCertificate to each of the above commands.

Once you have an active connection, you can begin to query the API. The example below returns a list of all hosts from SDDC Manager. One thing you will notice, if you are a PowerVCF user, is that you will need to parse the response a little more than you needed to with the PowerVCF cmdlet Get-VCFHost.

Running Invoke-VcfGetHosts will return a list of host elements

So to parse the response, you can do something like this, which will return the details of all hosts

But lets say you would like to filter the response to just the hosts from a specific workload domain. You first need the Id of the workload domain, in this case sfo-m01.

And you can then get a filtered list of hosts for that domain

Hopefully, this introduction was helpful, I will put together a series of blogs over the next few weeks covering some of the main VCF operations, such as bringup, commissioning hosts, deploying workload domains etc. As always, comments & feedback are welcome. Please let me know what your experience is with the new modules and I can feed it back to the engineering team.