VDI and PowerShell

Here at Quest we strive to PowerShell-enable pretty much everything we see. The newest Quest team to have gone PowerShell are our desktop virtualization folks - vWorkspace. They recently released a PowerShell module for vWorkspace that – as you could probably guess - adds great automation capabilities to the product.

(vWorkspace is a commercial product – so if you are not into desktop virtualization feel free to just consider this a commercial break – we will return to the free stuff in the next blog post. )

vWorkspace cmdlets include functionality such as:

• Managing vWorkspace administrative accounts,
• Turning on and off computers,
• Remotely installing MSI’s, and
• Setting a wide range of properties on the virtual machines and computers hosted by vWorkspace.

Additionally, vWorkspace offers a dynamic filtering syntax, much like Where-Object , that runs server-side rather than locally to speed up the query of large set s of objects. (As Don Jones put it in a session I once attended: “in PowerShell, keep your formatting as far to the right, and your filtering as far to the left as possible.”)

Get-QVWAdministrator –Filter { $QVWAdministrator.Name –like “mdivdi\*” –and  $QVWAdministrator.IsGroup –eq $true }

If you’re a vWorkspace customer, definitely check out the new module on the Quest Community site. They regularly make new versions available, adding more and more functionality each time. Often there’s also a beta of the new upcoming version of the vWorkspace PowerShell module available for anyone to test. In addition, there are some cool examples of how the vWorkspace PowerShell module can be used to ease day-to-day administration of vWorkspace.  Look for this kind of information in the Powershell section of the vWorkspace Community as well. I know the vWorkspace guys would love to hear some feedback on the module so please feel free to comment on their current release.

P.S. Thanks to Adam Driscoll from the vWorkspace team for helping me write this post. Also, if you have not checked out his interview at the recent PowerScripting podcast – you should. He is one of the smartest software engineers I know!