Friday, October 13, 2017

Creating Horizon Application Pools With PowerCLI

In a previous post I demonstrated how advanced functions provided by the VMware.Hv.Helper module allow you to create Instant Clone pools with Horizon PowerCLI.  Now I'd like to show how to get something done that's not already covered by these functions out of the box.

Since the VMware.Hv.Helper module doesn't include any functions for creating application pools I'm going to demonstrate how to create application pools using the ViewAPI documentation and View API Helper library.  (The View API Helper library is a wrapper over View APIs that makes life easier for PowerCLI developers.)  Looking through service types in the View API documentation I uncovered a service called application with a method called, "Application_Create," that accepts the object ApplicationSpec as an argument.





To easily take advantage of this application service and it's methods we use the View API Helper library to create an ApplicationService object as well a ApplicationSpec object that are easy to manipulate in PowerShell.   After updating the ApplicationSpec object with properties required for the Application_Create method we'll feed the method this ApplicaitonSpec object.

So, to begin with, we'll make a connection to the View API and assign the extension data to an easier to manage variable. 

Connect-HVServer -server view-connect.lab.local
$hzServices = $Global:DefaultHVServers.ExtensionData

Next, we can create an object for the application service by typing:

$application = New-Object VMware.Hv.ApplicationService

Before leverage the application_create method through this object, we'll create an ApplicationSpec object using the two lines below:

$appSpec = $application.getApplicationSpecHelper()
$AppPoolSpec = $appSpec.getDataObject()


Now we can begin populating the properties of this new object with the properties required for the application_create method to execute successfully.

$AppPoolSpec.Data.Name = 'Calculator'
$AppPoolSpec.Data.Description = "A pool for calculating "
$AppPoolSpec.Data.Enabled = $true
$AppPoolSpec.ExecutionData.ExecutablePath = '
c:\Windows\system32\calc.exe'

Next, we need to get the Farm ID of the farm we want to associate the pool with.  To do this we can use the Get-HVFarm advanced function:

$farm = Get-HVFarm "FarmName"
$AppPoolSpec.ExecutionData.Farm = $farm.Id

Finally, we can feed the application service object's method the variable for the global extension data  along with the now populated ApplicationSpec object.   

$application.Application_Create($hzServices, $AppPoolSpec)

And, voila!  You're application pool is created.

 

Now these were just the bare minimum required properties to make an application pool.  We could have specified additional properties such as parameters and start folders.   You can discover what's possible by looking at the API documentation.

For extra credit, you can go ahead and entitle users to this pool using New-HVEntitlement function:

New-HVEntitlement -ResourceName $AppPoolSpec.Data.Name -User 'lab\domain users' -ResourceType Application -Type Group

Below is a fast and loose sample script I put together that automates the creation of the farm, pool and entitlement.










2 comments:

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  2. Hi! Great article and script! I'm currently trying to export AppPools with PowerShell, but yet to no success...could you support in giving a hint how to GET all the info from API to be able to create an $AppPoolSpec? Kind Regards, Chris

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