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Making Powershell on UCS Director easier

Darren Starr
Level 4
Level 4

Hey everyone, I have had a bunch of large customers as of late who have asked me to come in to train them on Cisco UCS Director from a programming perspective. In all of these environments, we have been deploying large/national scale Hyper-V and ACI environments. This has proven very difficult since Powershell support in UCS Director is limited as it wasn't really designed originally as a solution to integrate with Hyper-V.

So, here's where I've come to. All of the customers have needed to perform large amounts of Powershell and PowerCLI (for their legacy VMware servers) but the act of calling a Powershell script is extremely hard to deal with.

To make Powershell a bit smoother, I have decided to start an open source project which simpifies the act of calling Powershell substantially. I'm working on a two phase project.

1) Allow users to turn a Powershell script into a Cloupiascript without so much as a single click. If you visit my Github Project; I have uploaded the source of a project you can use already. Please read the directions, you have to markup your Powershell a little, but it's no real problem. I'll publish a "How-to" video on Github sometime next week.

2) Remove the need for the Powershell Agent. There's no need for it anymore. I've recently gotten my Java environment up and running and am already implementing a WMI interface which I'm testing against Windows Server 2016 and 2012 R2. I've tested most of my code from the command line of a linux VM and it's working pretty well. It's also substantially faster and more informative than using the Powershell agent. I'll get scalability worked out before releasing that module.

And of course, I'm about to start releasing an extensive video series on programming with UCS Director and Cisco Cloud Manager in a modern Microsoft data center. I'm still figuring out a bunch of stuff myself, but I believe this is a pretty good start others.

If you have any questions or feature requests, let me know. I'll check back here.

BTW... I don't have roll-back support in the code yet. It's on my "TODO" for next week, but I'm teaching Cisco Wireless during the day.

Good luck!

P.S. - If you're really into digging into code, there's a native JavaScript JSON parser in the code. There really is just no reason to use the Java one. The one I've included parses JSON directly into Javascript so anyone who knows Javascript will be much more comfortable.

2 Replies 2

Darren Starr
Level 4
Level 4

I've published the code to Azure and here's the link

Powershell to UCS Director Custom Script Generator

It's entirely client side once it's running. If you want some sample code, in the GitHub, you can navigate to the sample data under JS.

Alternatively, you can direct link to my test file which is :

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/darrenstarr/Powershell-to-UCS-Director/master/UCSDPowershellCallGenerator/js/templates…

KAKA_2
Level 1
Level 1

@Darren Starr - did you finish the project you mentioned? i am facing the same issue while dealing with powercli.

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