Our development endeavours often include many tens of developers each with their own managed virtualised development environment. Typically, on top of these, there are multiple test and pre-production environments (each with clusters or load balanced clusters). We can therefore easily end up with 50+ Virtual Machines on a single project. The development/test cycle is very fluid creating atypical management demands on the environment. It is fair to say that these environments easily pass the threshold where scripting management routines becomes worthwhile. To help with this, VMWare have released a whole host of PowerShell CmdLets to wrap up the management web services. If it has got PowerShell in it, it gets my vote!
So here are the VMWare PowerShell libraries:
http://www.vmware.com/sdk/vitk_win/index.html
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/561-VMware-Infrastructure-Update-Manager-PowerShell-Library.html
Here is a blog covering the VMWare Infrastructure Toolkit (VI as they call it - sounds like my favourite text editor):
http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/
And here is a book on it:
http://halr9000.com/article/541
In fact I just noticed PowerGUI integration to VI Client:
