Expanding the Lab

I’ve been working on changing some things in my lab lately, and wanted to build  a jumphost that I could get to from anywhere and use it to work on my VMware Virtualization lab.  While it would be pretty easy to setup a Windows machine, my lab dollars are hard to come by and I wanted to save every bit to grow the capacity.  Ever since PowerShell was made available on multiple platforms, I’ve wanted to try it out on Linux.

I am in no way a Linux expert; but have worked in multiple distros and am fairly comfortable – at least for non-production use.  I set up a VM with Ubuntu Desktop and applied all of the patches.  I’ll let others debate the virtues of the various Linux distributions.  I picked Ubuntu a while ago and it seemed to make sense to focus on a single distribution to best develop my expertise.  I chose Ubuntu Desktop as I wanted to have a GUI available should I be working remotely and needed to do a demo or work though something requiring a browser.

What do I need?

The toolset I need for my jumphost is fairly easy to assemble:

• Modern Web Browser – Chrome and Firefox
• PowerShell – This is Microsoft’s command-line shell and scripting language.  In the multi-cloud world in which we live in – this can be the tool to help automate all of these platforms together
• PowerCLI – PowerCli is a PowerShell module for managing VMware vSphere
• Tools for future projects  (such as Restful API automation, Desired State Configuration , etc)

Continue reading “Installing PowerShell and PowerCLI on Linux”