A System Engineers Blog

Tag: macos

VMware – Using PowerCLI to generate install isos from patch packages

pwsh
Import-Module VMware.PowerCLI
Add-EsxSoftwareDepot -DepotUrl /Users/chronoit/Downloads/staging/8_0/VMware-ESXi-8.0a-20842819-depot.zip
PS /Users/chronoit/Downloads/staging/8_0> Get-ESXimageProfile 

Name                           Vendor          Last Modified   Acceptance Level
----                           ------          -------------   ----------------
ESXi-8.0a-20842819-no-tools    VMware, Inc.    11/24/2022 5:4… PartnerSupported
ESXi-8.0a-20842819-standard    VMware, Inc.    12/8/2022 12:0… PartnerSupported
Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile "ESXi-8.0a-20842819-standard" -ExportToIso -FilePath '/Users/chronoit/Downloads/staging/8_0/ESXi-8.0a-20842819-standard.iso'
Sorting in powershell for large software depots

Get-ESXimageProfile | Sort-Object -Descending -Property @{Expression={$_.Name.Substring(0,10)}},@{Expression={$_.CreationTime.Date}},Name | Select -first 5 | FT -AutoSize

VMware – Installing Powershell for Intel Macos

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

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