Book excerpt: VMware is the king when it comes to virtualization. Windows PowerShell has received huge accolades as an extremely powerful tool for automation of IT tasks. These two technologies make a lot of sense together, and VMware is now making that happen with the release of their VI Toolkit for Windows. In "Managing VMware Infrastructure With Windows PowerShell," you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line ("Are any of my virtual machines powered off?") to complex scripts to automate a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines. Simple, yet powerful; concise, yet robust; you will enjoy using this new language to solve your old problems using less code than you thought possible. If you are a system administrator responsible for managing a VMware Virtual Infrastructure (version 2.0 or above), or a standalone ESX Server (version 3.0 or above), then you need this book. Aimed at scripters of every level, the book starts off with a PowerShell primer and continues well into the internals of virtualization on the VMware platform.