Although as powerful a tool and environment both PowerCLI and PowerShell have been, for years they have been overwhelmingly restricted solely to a Microsoft Windows platform, which limited management and interaction coming from Linux and Mac-based platforms. Over time, this was resolved with alternate solutions for supporting and managing your VMware vSphere environment on those platforms; these solutions include the PowerCLI tool natively running within a containerized Docker environment.

In the following recipe, we will install PowerCLI into a Docker environment and connect it to our vCenter server.