Thanks to none other than Mr. Luc Dekens the VI Toolkit Community Extensions are growing by leaps and bounds.

Here’s a full list of the new advanced functions Luc has added:

Name	Description
Get-TkeAllPrivileges	Show all privileges defined by VirtualCenter.
Get-TkeCDPInfo	Gets Cisco CDP info for a given host. This lets you know what switch port your host is on.
Get-TkePermissions	Lists permissions assigned to a given object.
Get-TkeRolePrivileges	Show all privileges defined by a role.
Get-TkeRoles	Gets all roles defined in VirtualCenter For example, Administrator, Read-Only, etc.
New-TkeRole	Create a new role in VirtualCenter.
Remove-TkePermissions	Remove permissions from an entity.
Remove-TkeRole	Remove a role from the system.
Set-TkePermissions	Set an entity’s permissions.
Set-TkeRole	Change the definition of a role.

As you can see most of these are around roles and permissions. Armed
with these cmdlets you have a pretty complete way to automate the setup
of permissions.

The other cmdlet is Get-TkeCDPInfo. CDP stands for Cisco Discovery
Protocol, and if your ESX host is connected to a switch port that
supports CDP, this cmdlet will help you determine what switch port the
system is actually connected to.

Also, the VI Toolkit Community Extensions have been updated to
support the newly-release PowerShell CTP3. One of the big differences
between CTP2 and CTP3 is that script cmdlets are no longer supported,
instead they have been replaced by Advanced Functions. Advanced
Functions have a number of advantages over script cmdlets, one of the
most obvious is support for embedding documentation in the function. If
you load the community extensions and type “help Get-TkeCDPInfo” you’ll
get a full usage listing as well as other help to get you started. All
in all, this stuff is starting to get a lot more usable.

If you can’t wait to get started, be sure you have CTP3 installed and download the Community Extensions today!

Great work, Luc!

VIA: http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2008/12/tons-of-new-stuff-in-the-vi-toolkit-community-extensions.html

While
we all eagerly await CTP3 of PowerShell Version 2 I wanted to mention
that I’m a big fan of PowerShell Version 2′s modules and script cmdlets
because combining these technologies makes it possible to build large,
cohesive and really useful management modules even if you’re not a
developer.

Glenn Sizemore has written just such a script cmdlet that lets you
set the security properties of virtual switches. With his cmdlet you
can configure whether virtual switches allow virtual machines on the
switch to see traffic to and from other virtual machines using the
-AllowPromiscuous flag. With the -ForgedTransmits flag you can
configure whether VMs are allowed to send packets using a different
source MAC address from the VM’s real MAC address, and with the
-MacChanges flag set, VMs on the switch can change their MAC addresses.

These options can be useful for enabling security-related
applications, for instance if you want to run an intrusion detection
virtual appliance on a virtual switch you’ll need to set
-AllowPromiscuous on the switch. The default is to have
AllowPromiscuous disabled while ForgedTransmits and MacChanges are
enabled, which is pretty much what you get with a real unmanaged switch.

Glenn’s cmdlet makes changing things really easy. You can see Glenn’s original cmdlet,
but note that the name and parameters are changed a bit in the
community extensions, to make it fit a bit more with other aspects of
the extensions. Here’s a quick example of the new cmdlets in action:

1	# List all my virtual switches and their security properties.
2	Get-VMHost | Get-TkeVSwitchSecurity
3	# Enable Promiscuous Mode on vSwitch1 on all ESX hosts in cluster SQL
4	Get-Cluster SQL | Get-VMHost | Set-TkeVSwitchSecurity vswitch1 -AllowPromiscuous

The VI Toolkit Extensions is now up to 30cmdlets that cover a wide
range of really useful stuff. If you’re looking to get started with the
VI Toolkit Community Extensions, Eric Sloof has a great writeup on how to do just that.
As PowerShell v2 nears official release, we’ve got some things planned
to make the VI Toolkit Extensions amazingly easy to use, for now it’s a
bit primitive but gets the job done.

Via: http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2008/12/new-in-the-vi-toolkit-community-extensions-set-virtual-switch-security.html