Introduction

When installing PowerCLI, the optional vCloud Director PowerCLI can be installed to let you manage vCloud environments. This addition allows customers to connect to and manage vCloud installations, either in a private installation using vCloud Director or in a hybrid or public cloud hosted on a vCloud Provider. For vCloud customers who do not handle backend administration on vCloud Director datacenters, VMware also offers the PowerCLI for Tenants distribution, which is a reduced set of cmdlets needed for an end-user. For the recipes in this chapter, you will need the full distribution of PowerCLI with vCloud Director PowerCLI. Connecting to vCloud is a little different than connecting to and managing vSphere with PowerCLI, but all of the concepts that you learned up to this point apply in a vCloud environment.

Think of vCloud as a superset of controls over the vSphere virtualization platform. vCloud extends the concepts of vSphere, but also adds the concept of providers and...