While not as popular a term as virtualization, PowerShell is starting to find its own place in this virtual world. For those not familiar with the technology, PowerShell was created by Microsoft as an extensible command line interface shell and associated scripting language. It is an operating environment for commands, such as cmdlets, functions, scripts and executables. While perhaps unknown to some, it has act While not as popular a term as virtualization, PowerShell is starting to find its own place in this virtual world. For those not familiar with the technology, PowerShell was created by Microsoft as an extensible command line interface shell and associated scripting language. It is an operating environment for commands, such as cmdlets, functions, scripts and executables. While perhaps unknown to some, it has actually been around for a while in one form or another. Back in 2003, Microsoft started developing the new shell environment and called it Monad. Now, renamed PowerShell, this technology is popping up in numerous places and is built into Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as an optional feature. And it’s being adopted by administrators and developers alike.Microsoft has put a lot of faith and effort into PowerShell. Case in point, the technology is one of the cornerstone features of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Their entire GUI layer is built on top of PowerShell. And now, it seems VMware and VMware administrators are starting to turn the corner as well with their support for this technology. VMware has added a dedicated section to it on the company’s blog list, the VI PowerShell Blog. And recently, VMware showcased the technology at their latest event, VMworld Europe 2008. And according to one of its recent blog posts, there seemed to be a lot of excitement for PowerShell at the show – the PowerShell lab at VMworld Europe was attended by over 250 students who seemed to give the lab experience a lot of their time. I in fact also attended the lab during the show and found it quite interesting and compelling. For me, this was the first time I had actually used the PowerShell cmdlets to operate and manage a VMware environment. I spoke with VMware’s Product Manager of API & SDK, Carter Shanklin at length. Like the people being exposed to PowerShell for the first time, Shanklin seemed very energetic about the possibilities that this scripting feature brings to VMware environments. The VI Toolkit for Windows will Beta sometime this month. In the mean time, if you weren’t able to attend this lab at VMworld Europe, you are in luck. VMware has made the lab manual available for download, here. While not quite the same experience as hammering away at it during the trade show event, still, the manual has a lot of great examples to walk through to get you on the right path of thinking about PowerShell uses in your VMware environment. Software Development