Questions[powercli](server)

We're rolling out a new testbed in the office, and need to spin up ~30-40 Linux VMs (mostly RHEL 5/6, some SuSE). Running on VMware ESXi 5.5, we'd like to automate the process. There's a pre-made answer file for the installer, the question is how to have VMware tell the script how to configure the machine (based on hostname).

Basically, there should be some PowerCLI script for VMware that creates machines and mounts the installer .iso. It should then start the machine, pass some parameters to the answer file and be off and running (pending completion, it should kick off the next one).

Any ideas/best practices? Have we missed anything?

Edit: To be clear the question is this: "how do I pass parameters from the VMware PowerCLI to an unattended installer answer file?"

I'm trying to run a capacity report, and when I run the Get-HardDisk cmdlet in PowerCLI, the value it returns for CapacityKB is the Provisioned space. For example, let's say I've thin provisioned a 200GB disk, which is currently using say 30GB, it returns the 200GB value.

Is there any way I can get the other value? I need to know how much disk space is actually being used on the LUN by the vmdk file. My PowerCLI version is 5.0.1.

I have ssh login to an ESXi 5 host.

All the guests have vmware tools running, so they can be shut down by the host properly.

I would like an equivalent for this menu option in vSphere client:

It shuts down all the guests automatically (if they have vmware tools running) and then the host itself.

Is there such a "smart" shutdown all command on the ESXi 5 commandline?

We have given our users privilege to take snapshots. But now it is uncontrollable and people started taking meaningless snapshots and never deleting it.

Due to this we are facing performance issue, Disk space overloaded issue and etc.

I would like to prevent users from taking snapshots beyond certain limit. For example. Users may not be allowed to take more than 3 snapshots .

How to achieve this? ( We are using ESXi 4 and ESXi 4.1 and VMware Vsphere )

If it can't be prevented , atleast is there a mechanism to alert me when user creating more than 3 snapshots?

We have several view-desktops and I need a script to be performed once on all desktops. Sadly, WMI is disabled. These desktop are all running Windows XP SP3

I thought I read about the possibility to execute commands in a guest-vm via VMwares PowerCLI. Can anyone confirm if that is possible or can even provide a link?