Last night I went to the #DutchVMUG to have a 'mini-meeting'. It was all about Powershell and the VESI, a free initiative from the cool guys Vizioncore. The session was sponsored by XTG, a Dutch VATC - thanks for the facilities and excellent lab environment (Marcel van Os created a quite large lab ). The other sponsor was Vizioncore - BIG thanks for the pizza and beer, and although I didn't drink any, you could certainly tell the guys appreciated it.

The sessions were presented by no-one less then:

Victor van den Berg, XTG - http://www.vmug.nl & http://www.viktorious.nl/blog/
Arnim van Lieshout - http://www.van-lieshout.com/
Arne Fokkema - http://ict-freak.nl/
Alan Renouf - http://www.virtu-al.net/

After kickoff and a short word from our sponsors we explored the core of Powershell. Presented by (V) and (A) - Viktor and Arnim. Starting how Powershell is structured, the methods, object based objects, the variables. Little smart things like: %, $_, | and ?. They also provided excellent links to great resources, so I hope they release the slides soon. I also liked the special variables like $global:defaultVIServer to check to what servers we have a connection.

After fiddling around with Powershell in the lab, pizza and beer, we had a short message from Scott Herold, thanking us for joining the session.

Then we had the VESI presentation from Arne and Alan. To be honest, the VESI was one of those tools I installed and didn't had a lot of time to play around with. I was doing my Powershelling with PowerGUI Editor, which works fine for me. But after this session I decided to migrate all my Powershell scripts to the VESI and create a Powerpack or something. Talking about Powerpacks: Alan has build a GREAT Powerpack: the VMware Community Powerpack. This is NOT to miss, grab it from here.

Anyway, I'm off to my homelab now, implement the latest version of VESI (1.2.5 atm), download the Powerpack and start converting my scripts to the VESI!!! And Viktor, thanks again for setting up this event!