PowerGUI is one of the best free tools, especially for those of us who work with PowerShell environments and still do not feel comfortable, it is a graphic tool that allows us to create, edit, import, export our Windows PowerShell-based scripts. In this document we will see how to install it that has nothing and how we can organize our scripts, as well as being able to see how to use scripts for VMware, Exchange, Active Directory, SQL, Routers, communications, Internet, Systems Center, Operations Manager, Xen, Hyper-V, Citrix, Skype, Reporting, Twitter … everything that relies on PowerShell.

With PowerGUI we will be able to better manage our environment if our limit was the administration under PowerShell, With just the mouse we can create our own scripts or we can directly import packs of scripts already created (PowerPack).

First of all, download PowerGUI from the official website of Quest Software. The installation has nothing, is a MyWife style assistant (To everything yes) with the possibility of installing some PowerPacks that the installer comes with, But it is advisable to download the ones we need from the Internet and always the latest versions. A PowerPack is a PowerGUI extension that brings already organized scripts that a guru has worked on or that we can directly create to exchange.

This is the main view of PowerGUI, Simple in principle, until we create our scripts or directly import the ones that we can find, for example on its official site: http://powergui.org/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=21, there we can find real wonders.

This would be the view with the PowerPack de VMware to manage our VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure, For example, this would be a PowerPack that we can develop, adding our hosts to later execute from here tasks that are infinitely simpler or that we could not execute, for example, from the VMware client (For example).

Depending on our environment we can already find authentic gems like this, of Alan Renouf, that will allow us anything that we would not have thought of before or that we would have the need and did not know how to do it, A simple example, When we have a nice virtual environment, We can lose control, for example, of the snapshots that we have dancing around, Well, we can create our own queries xej. There will be some PowerPacks that require previous steps such as in this case having VMware vSphere PowerCLI previously installed and some PowerPack previously loaded.

And like this there are a lot of PowerPacks that can make our lives easier!

Example of how to manage our Microsoft Exchange environment 2007 only with PowerGUI: Part1 and Part2. You can have some useful information on the PowerGUI wiki.