PowerCLI 5.8 Release 1 – new SPBM cmdlets

powercli58Yesterday 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.

10 Replies to “PowerCLI 5.8 Release 1 – new SPBM cmdlets”

  1. I don’t understand what happens in the brain of Vmware engineers. If you have a server with hundreds of virtual machines, it seems the only way to shutdown them all, orderly, is to log in via SSH and run a script inside the server. I could not find a way to do this simple task, but very important, using any other way. Just looping over all the VMs, check status and initiate shutdown remotely. Am I missing something? No powering them off by brute-force, just tell the guest OS to graciously shut itself down.

          1. Just install VMware Tools for Linux inside of VMs. Then graceful shutdown works nice, at least for us.

    1. I tried in Fedora 20. The Perl SDK does even install. The command line interface lacks the commands. I have not heard of the Vsphere management appliance. Kindly let me know what commands in the cli for linux can do this. My company cannot use windows in our datacenter for security purposes, not even a laptop with Windows is allowed.

      1. Philip,

        Do a simple google for vSphere Management Appliance – it will lead you to the download site and the documentation. It should address your needs.

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