PowerCLI 5.8 Release 1 – new SPBM cmdlets

Yesterday saw the release of vCloud Suite 5.8. While there are quite a few new enhancements to the VMware product line in this release, what really jumped out at me were the new PowerCLI cmdlets for Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). SPBM is a critical component of VIrtual SAN (VSAN), and will play a major role in the Virtual Volumes (VVols) feature which has been tech previewed at VMworld 2014. VVols will enable our storage array partners to implement out Software Defined Storage vision –  you can read more about there. So what are the new cmdlets for PowerCLI in the 5.8 release?

The Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) cmdlets are included in a new snap-in for storage. The snap-in contains the following cmdlets:

• Export-SpbmStoragePolicy
• Get-SpbmCapability
• Get-SpbmCompatibleStorage
• Get-SpbmEntityConfiguration
• Get-SpbmStoragePolicy
• Import-SpbmStoragePolicy
• New-SpbmRule
• New-SpbmRuleSet
• New-SpbmStoragePolicy
• Remove-SpbmStoragePolicy
• Set-SpbmEntityConfiguration
• Set-SpbmStoragePolicy

This will allow you to achieve a significant amount of storage automation. Right now, this will help you to automate policy management on VSAN, but going forward, this will also help you to automate policy management on storage arrays that have implemented VVols. Great work by our PowerCLI team.