These slides look to have been released after last years VMworld, and provide a great introduction to scripting and automation with the VMware tools.
The labs will help you get started with scripting VMware Infrastructure to enable automation, extensibility, and integration with existing tools. When we ran this at VMworld, we had about 600 attendees and it was so popular some students camped out in line to attend the lab a second time. We had so many folks request a way to share this with their teams that we decided to publish the whole thing for the community.
The lab is available in two versions: one shows how to use the VI Perl Toolkit and the other shows how to use the PowerShell-based VI Toolkit (for Windows). The attached files contain the manuals for both versions of the lab and the exercises for both versions of the lab.
The lab takes 2-3 hours to complete (not including the time to set the environment up first), but is conveniently split into 20 minute exercises. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of VMware Infrastructure, resources for using the toolkits, and a variety of useful scripts for performing common administrative tasks. The exercises cover triggering tasks, examining VM attributes, performing actions on VMs, and exporting performance data