As a system engineer who uses a mac I often run into problems with software that wasn’t really designed or documented properly for macos users. This guide will get you up and running with a basic PowerCLI environment.

Recommended Software Versions

macos Ventura 13.6.4
macos Python 3.9.6
PowerCLI Recommended Python3.7.X (no longer available in brew)

Install brew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Install prerequisites

brew install xz
brew install pyenv
brew install [email protected]
pyenv install 3.7.17
/Users/<youruser>/.pyenv/versions/3.7.17/bin/python3 -m pip install six psutil lxml pyopenssl

Since Python 3.7 has been removed from brew (fully deprecated) we will want to move to pyenv to manage your python installs (which you should probably do anyway). You need to install [email protected] as this is a requirement for powercli and is a package that brew held back as it's used by multiple packages so it's still installable separately from brew python.

Install Powershell

brew install powershell/tap/powershell

Install PowerCli

 pwsh
 Install-Module VMware.PowerCLI -Scope CurrentUser

Configure PowerCLI

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -PythonPath /Users/<youruser>/.pyenv/versions/3.7.17/bin/python3  -Scope User

You now have a functional Powershell environment.

Other Useful commands

Listing all available versions of powercli
Find-Module -AllVersions VMware.PowerClI

Discover your currently installed version of modules
Get-Module -Name VMware.* | Select-Object -Property Name,Version

Reset your Powershell environment
Get-InstalledModule | Uninstall-Module -Force