Using PowerCLI SPBM cmdlets to create VMs with storage policy

Recently I was looking for a way to consume the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) cmdlets in PowerCLI. I wanted to see if I could provision a VM from a Template onto my vSAN datastore with a particular policy rather than simply change it after it was deployed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, as some of the commands I tried would only change the VM Home Namespace to the new policy, and leave the disks with the default datastore policy. And when I tried to clone a new VM from a template, I couldn’t get the VM to…

PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1 and vSAN

The first email I saw this morning in my inbox was from my good pal, Alan Renouf. Alan is our product line manager for APIs, SDKs, CLIs and Automation Frameworks (congrats on the promotion Alan). Anyway, Alan was announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1. There are a whole bunch of improvements in this release, and much kudos must go to the PowerCLI team. However from a vSAN perspective, things look really cool. [Update] This version of PowerCLI also works with vSAN 6.2 and 6.0, so there is no need for customers to upgrade to vSAN…

What’s new in Virtual SAN 6.5

I know that there will be a lot of information coming your way from various sources on this exact topic. Obviously, I would urge you to check out the latest and greatest documentation from our technical marketing guys for deeper detail and “how-to” guides. However, I did want to provide a brief overview of what new VSAN features are available in vSphere 6.5. Note that we also refer to this version of VSAN as 6.5.

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…