In this post we will continue our series ” The Way To PowerCLI ” and today we will talk about starting and stopping VMs
With PowerCLI you can manage and automate your VMware infrastructure from the command line. After you connect to vCenter
start with starting VMs
You can use the complete name of the VM, or you can use a wildcard or use the cmdlet in a pipe. so the cmdlet for starting VM
Start-VM
you can start VM with complete name
Start-VM -VM Test01
or from pipe input
Get-VM -Name Test02 | Start-VM
Starting VMs with wildcard
below table show different option
Wildcard character
Description
Example
Matches
Does not match
Matches zero or more characters, starting at the specified position
A, ag, Apple
Matches any character at the specified position
An, in, on
Matches a range of characters
[a-l]ook
book, cook, look
Matches the specified characters
[bc]ook
book, cook
so in first case if we use * it will start all the VMs “test01 and test02”
Start-VM -VM Test*
second case it will match any character instead of the “?”
Start-VM -VM Test0?
this time test01 and test02 will start
Start-VM -VM Test0[12]
you can get more info about Start-VM using Help
now lest move to
Stopping VMs
to stop VM gracefully VMware tools must be installed on the VM and you will use command
Shutdown
-
VMGuest -VM "VM Name"
If you try to stop VMs that aren’t running you get errors and your commands don’t continue, so to check the power state of the VMs
Get-VM -name test* | where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"}
then you can use
Shutdown-VMGuest -VM test*
if you are not sure what will happen if you run this command you can add “-WhatIf” at end of the cmdlet and powercli will simulate what will happen if you run this cmdlet
Shutdown-VMGuest -VM test* -WhatIf
Stopping VMs without VMware tools
to stop VM that don’t have VMware tools use cmdlet
Stop-VM
Stop-VM -VM tlab*
this will force shutdown the VM without saving anything
