TBL Networks, The Blinky Light

This is the Live Blog of INF-VSP2448 – Automating Bare Metal to the Cloud and Beyond. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers:

• Alan Renouf – VMware, Inc. Senior Technical Marketing Architect
• Eric Williams – Cisco Systems, Inc. Technical Marketing Engineer
• Jake Robinson – BlueLock Solutions Architect

Alan Renouf is on the stage and talking about the history of PowerShell and PowerCLI. PowerCLI will be the basis for the automation featured in the presentation. He is discussing some basic PowerShell and PowerCLI cmdlets and how easy it is to create scripts by piping cmdlets into other cmdlets.

PowerCLI Snap-In’s available in the latest PowerCLI release include:

• Core – Managing vSphere
• Image Builder – Image Profiles
• Auto Deploy – Deploying ESXi via PXE
• License – Working with vSphere Licensing
• Cloud – vCloud Director Providers
• Tenant (new in 5.1) – vCloud Director Tenants – You can give these to your cloud tenants

PowerCLI 5.1 – What’s New?

Core

• Kerberos
• Linked clones
• Datastore clusters
• VCloud object relation

Cloud

• Organization creation / manipulation
• Permissions
• Assign compute and network resources
• Create / modify vApp networks

Eric Williams from Cisco is taking the stage now. He will be discussing what can be done with Cisco and PowerShell. First up is a Cisco UCS overview. UCS was developed with an API first, then GUI. A single API will manage any component of the UCS that is available through the UCS Manager GUI. The UCS PowerShell library is UCS PowerTool. There are over 1500 PowerShell cmdlets available today. Most of these are auto-generated with the UCS XML Schema. This is very cool!

There is a ConvertTo-UCSCmdlet cmdlet that will convert UCS actions done in the GUI to a series of PowerShell cmdlets. Automated automation. That is awesome!

Up next is the automation demo. The demo starts with a minimal UCS configuration. vCenter is a minimal config as well. There are no hosts in vCenter. They are now running a PowerShell script.

• Log into domain
• Create / manipulate UCS Manager objects
• Create / manipulate vCenter objects

The script is creating server pools, VLANs, MAC pools, WWPN pools, etc. It also creates a service profile template and a service profile based on that template. Next the script is doing all the configuration in vCenter. The script now monitors the state of the configuration application to the blade in UCS manager.

The script is using the OEM string in VMware Auto-Deploy to determine the ESXi image version from Auto-Deploy depending on the Service Profile Template name in UCS. A host is now added to vCenter in a DRS cluster with all the configuration that it needs (storage, networking, etc.). Now a second script is run to add two more hosts to the cluster. This was all automated. After running the two scripts, a three host cluster was ready to go.

The next script that is demonstrated is a rolling upgrade for the ESXi hosts. This script updates the UCS firmware and the ESXi image. The script actually grabs the latest image from the VMware website and tells the hosts to boot from that image using Auto-Deploy.

The scripts shown in this demo are available on develper.cisco.com. So far, this has been my favorite session. It shows the extensibility and management power of PowerShell. That wraps up this session. Thank you for reading.