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I've been doing a lot of work with PowerGUI and PowerShell in VMware environments recently and I've finally started to show some of the fruits of my labor to various coworkers.  I've found that the individuals who already understand the flexibility that PowerShell provides to a VMware environment instantly have that light bulb kick on that says "Oh, that's awesome".  There are others who have not had the privilege of working with PowerShell and automating management tasks in their environment.  I find it takes a little bit of effort to show the value of this "new" technology to get them to see the value.  I wanted to take a moment today to provide a quick 5-10 minute primer to getting started with PowerGUI and PowerShell in a VMware Infrastructure. 

This is the first part of what will likely be a 3-part series on how to fully take advantage of PowerGUI and PowerShell to more effectively manage your Virtual Infrastructure.  I'm hoping parts 2 and 3 include some video walkthroughs, as that is really the only way to convey just how cool this technology really is, but that all depends on how accommodating my work schedule is.

Ron, Mike, and I have decided that starting in 2009, we will be giving out 2 free chapters of the VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide every 2 weeks.  I am still in the process of collecting the source DOC and PDF files from the Publisher, but as of right now we are anticipating the first two chapters to be availabe during the first week of January.  I've tried to come up with a list of reasons as to why we would do something as crazy as give the book out for free, and this is all I came up with.

• We got sick of carrying the damn book around ourselves (Not to mention the number of people begging for a PDF version).
• Our wives caught onto the whole "The more we sell, the more we make, and the more they feel we should buy them" thing, so we decided to try and outsmart them.
  
• We want people to keep coming back to VMGuru.com to see how long it actually takes me to update it.  (Well, Mike can keep driving traffic to his site.)
• With VMworld Europe 2009 around the corner, I need to remind people I am still alive.  That will allow me to attract attention while pulling booth duty at the show so my company says "Wow, we should keep sending Scott to Europe, he's famous here"

I've finally decided that it's time to crawl out from under my rock and get some updates going on the site. What better way to do that than to announce the new PowerGUI PowerPack for VMware update that we've (Quest Software) released over at PowerGIU.org. For a more detailed write-up you can visit Kirk's blog, who is hopefully getting in a well-earned holiday after blasting out this amazing update. Not only was I able to do my part in helping release the updated PowerPack, but I've finally jumped on the bandwagon with Twitter for those that care enough to follow me.

As I get more deeply involved in PowerShell, expect some cool updates and unofficial PowerGUI Links and Actions to make their way to this site as Quest continues to extend its Windows, Applications, and Database dominance deeper into the virtualization market with the assistance of our wholly-owned subsidiaries Vizioncore and Provision Networks.

As we kindly pointed out on page 272 of the new VI3 Book, we have a very thorough document written by Rob Zylowski, who is an awesome consultant not just for virtualization, but one of the best in the Windows and networking space that I have ever had the pleasure to work with.  Ron, Mike, and I put aboslutely NO effort into this document.  It is 100% Rob Zylowski.  Unfortunately, it was cut from the book due to its mammoth size.  It weighs in at 75 pages.  This is the most thorough document of understanding the back-end database structure of VirtualCenter I have ever seen.