This week, EMC published our Powershell Toolkit (PSToolkit) to the public allowing Windows administrators to incorporate EMC tasks into their command-line operations or scripts. For those of you who may not be familiar with Windows Powershell, it provides system administrators using Microsoft Windows or Microsoft based applications to perform administrative functions through a command-line or to incorporate these commands into a script for automated operations (typically in a large scale deployment or when performing a repetitive process).
So what's so cool about EMC releasing a Powershell Toolkit? First of all it allows administrators to perform storage related tasks via a command line. This includes tasks such as creating storage volumes, mapping storage to hosts, creating snapshot copies and removing volumes or snapshots. The other reason is that while this is handy for administrators who perform work in a Powershell environment, it also allows Hyper-V administrators to incorporate these tasks in a script when deploying a large number of virtual machines. Setting up storage as part of the virtual machine deployment or using snapshot images off a gold copy virtual machine to rapidly deploy multiple copies of a VM can be incorporated into a script and executed with a single click of a button.
The EMC Powershell Toolkit uses SMI-S, a storage standard developed by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) for managing SAN devices. This means that as more storage programs and storage devices continue to use SMI-S for management, the EMC Powershell Toolkit will easily plug in to this architecture.
To use the EMC PSToolkit you will need:
- SMI-S Provider 4.1.2 or later versions.
- Powershell 2.0 CTP3
- .Net Framework 3.5
- Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 for array management commands.
Enjoy PSToolkit and feel free to share any comments, feedback, suggestions, etc!
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