I was wondering what new cmdlets had been added in PowerCLI 5.1 as opposed to PowerCLI version 5.0.1. I also wanted to see if there were any changes between the beta release of vSphere 5.1 and the final release which was made public yesterday. The answer is yes, there are indeed changes between all three versions! Here are the cmdlet counts for each version:
[table tablesorter=”1″ file=”http://www.shogan.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/powercli-version-cmdlet-counts.csv “][/table]
To see what the differences were, I ran the following on each version of PowerCLI (5.0.1, 5.1 beta, and 5.1 final).
First of all to get the number of cmdlets and see if there were any changes at a quick glance, I ran a simple count against the Get-VICommand cmdlet:
(Get-VICommand).Count
Seeing differences between each version, I then decided to get a full list of cmdlets for each version, and then run a diff against these.
Get-VICommand | Export-CSV C:\cmdletsforversionX.csv
I then opened each CSV file, grabbed the full list of cmdlets from the “Name” column, and ran these against each other using on online difference checking site. Here are the results:
vSphere PowerCLI 5.1 beta had an additional 4 cmdlets over PowerCLI 5.0.1, with 1 having been removed.
PowerCLI 5.1 beta changes
| Removed | New |
| Get-EsxSoftwareChannel | Get-DeployOption |
| Get-EsxSoftwareDepot | |
| Remove-EsxImageProfile | |
| Set-DeployOption |
vSphere PowerCLI 5.1 (final/public release) had an additional 47 cmdlets over PowerCLI 5.1 beta, with none having been removed. These mostly seem to be related to the vCloud Suite as far as I can tell.
PowerCLI 5.1 beta to 5.1 public release changes
[table tablesorter=”1″ file=”http://www.shogan.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/powercli-5-1-public-cmdlet-additions.csv”][/table]
It is worth noting that in each case I had a full installation of PowerCLI – i.e. had selected to install PowerCLI normal and Cloud cmdlets during installation.
So it looks like I’ll need to spend some time getting acquainted with the new cmdlets. If you are curious as to what each does, don’t forget the built in help – using “Get-Help Cmdletname” and the use of the -examples switch.