How to Access ESXCLI with PowerCLI

July 22, 2017 Dan Franciscus
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Technical

If you have worked with vSphere, chances are you have had to perform some tasks on an ESXi host using ESXCLI. This command line interface created by VMware enables you to perform such tasks as installing software, configuring NIC adapters or seting firewall rules on ESXi. Since ESXi runs only Linux, using ESXCLI can be a bit daunting for Windows admins who don’t have much experience with Linux. Luckily, if you know PowerShell, you can use PowerCLI as a door into ESXCLI.

Connecting to an ESXi host

First, we need to connect to either a vCenter server or ESXi host. We can do this with the Connect-VIServer cmdlet. Keep in mind you can also connect to your vCenter server as well.

Connect-VIServer -Server devhost -Credential (Get-Credential)

Exposing ESX CLI

Now that we are connecting to our ESXi host “Devhost” we can use the Get-EsxCli cmdlet in PowerCLI to expose the ESXCLI functionality by placing it into a variable.

$DevHost = Get-EsxCli -VMHost devhost -V2
Notice I used the –V2 parameter. This means we are using version 2 of this cmdlet as version 1 is deprecated and compatibility is not guaranteed.
Now if we just run the output of $DevHost we see the “elements” we have to work with for this ESXi host.

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