Virtually Jason

I've recently been playing around with the -RunAsync parameter in some of my PowerCLI scripts, and I'm super impressed!  I'm also super late to the party; I mean, LucD was writing about it back in 2010, but still!  So, what's it do?  It speeds up tasks that don't need to be run sequentially, that's what it does. For example, if I have a list of VMs that all need to move into a new folder, I could do it like this: $folder = get - folder "New Folder" $vmNames = get - content MyList.txt foreach ($vmname in $vmNames){ get - vm $vmname | move - vm - destination $folder } And that would move one VM, then the next, then the next, etc.  Depending on the number of VMs, it could take a real  long time.  This process could take a while because, the way this script is written, the system will wait for each "move" to complete before initiating the next.  That's where -RunAsync  comes in. $folder = get - folder "New Folder" ...

Recently, I've written several scripts that need to perform relatively simple operations on a large set of objects (such as moving a bunch of VMs onto a given Port Group or reconfiguring NTP for a bunch of ESXi hosts).  In general, I approach these challenges by generating a list of all of the objects that I want to manipulate, and then I ForEach my way through that list until I've finished all of my work. This approach obviously works just fine; it's the way that we'e written scripts for ages.  Just as you might expect from something that's been done the same way for a long time (particularly something IT related...), that's not really the best way to do it any more.  With PowerShell version 3, Microsoft introduced the concept of Parallel operations.  Starting with PowerCLI 6, VMware changed PowerCLI to make it much easier to use with PowerShell Parallel operations. So, what is a parallel operation?  Well, a simple (and very practical!) example is that For...