Nutanix AHV: Creating a new VM using PowerShell

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Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

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This week I got a request via Matthijs van den Berg, one of the Nutanix SEs in EMEA. He was working with a Dutch Service Provider that has standardised its complete infrastructure deployment using PowerShell as the glue between components.

This service provider was working with Nutanix AHV and wanted to deploy a new VM based on Powershell. Looking at the current interfaces for Nutanix we can define multiple ways to achieve the same thing.  The following interfaces are available:

• REST API
• HTML5 GUI
• CLI – ACLI & NCLI
• Scripting interfaces (PowerShell)

The following definitions are from the Nutanix Bible as Steve Poitras already explained this:

While most Service Providers pick the Rest API it’s an easy step to use one of the other solutions. Or at least, that’s what you’d expect so I dove into this.. The steps to create a VM on Nutanix AHV using aCLI are straight forward, to create a VM call KBTestVM99 with 2 vCPUs and 2GB of RAM with a NIC in vLAN 100 and a 50GB disk in aCLI you would use:

vm.create KBTestVM99 memory=2G num_vcpus=2

vm.nic_create KBTestVM99 network=vlan.100 

vm.disk_create KBTestVM99 create_size=50G container=default

Doing this in PoSH was a little bit less straightforward but with the AOS 4.6 code (not GA as of now) I was able to achieve the same using the following code:

# kees@nutanix.com
# @kbaggerman on Twitter
# https://blog.myvirtualvision.com
# Created on December 24th, 2015

## VM Creation
# Setting Variables
$Name = "KBTestVM99"
$NumVcpus = "2"
$MemoryMB = "2048"

# Creating the VM
new-ntnxvirtualmachine -Name $Name -NumVcpus $NumVcpus -MemoryMB $MemoryMB

## Network Settings
# Get the VmID of the VM
$vminfo = Get-NTNXVM | where {$_.vmName -eq $Name}
$vmId = ($vminfo.vmid.split(":"))[2]

# Set NIC for VM on default vlan (Get-NTNXNetwork -> NetworkUuid)
$nic = New-NTNXObject -Name VMNicSpecDTO
$nic.networkUuid = "4405198a-8160-49a6-b4ab-ffbde7913f31"

# Adding a Nic
Add-NTNXVMNic -Vmid $vmId -SpecList $nic

## Disk Creation
# Setting the SCSI disk of 50GB on Containner ID 1025 (get-ntnxcontainer -> ContainerId)
$diskCreateSpec = New-NTNXObject -Name VmDiskSpecCreateDTO
$diskcreatespec.containerid = 1025
$diskcreatespec.sizeMb = 51200

# Creating the Disk
$vmDisk =  New-NTNXObject –Name VMDiskDTO
$vmDisk.vmDiskCreate = $diskCreateSpec

# Adding the Disk to the VM
Add-NTNXVMDisk -Vmid $vmId -Disks $vmDisk

Of course there’s more to do with this script like accepting vlan IDs and Container names as input and do a cross reference to the networkUuid and the ContainerID but this script was created to show how you can create a VM on Nutanix AHV using PowerShell.

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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