I’ve recently got my first Raspberry Pi up and running, with the initial aim of using it as a VPN server to allow me to connect to my home lab when I’m away. But once you have a Raspberry Pi, the possibilities are kinda endless. Lets see if we can run the new version of VMware PowerCLI, version 10, which uses PowerShell 6 and therefore can run on Linux, on my Raspberry Pi.

It turn out to be very straightforward, although you do need to be on the latest version of Raspbian, Raspbian Stretch. I’m also using the Raspberry Pi 3, not sure if this will run ok on older versions.

Follow these steps to get it PowerCLI installed;

First, we’ll follow Microsoft’s documentation. Note I’ve updated the commands to install 6.0.1, not 6.0.0, as PowerCLI needs 6.0.1.

# Install PowerShell 6 prerequisites
sudo apt-get install libunwind8

# Download the PowerShell 6.0.1 tar.gz
wget https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v6.0.1/powershell-6.0.1-linux-arm32.tar.gz

# Make a folder for powershell
mkdir ~/powershell

# Unpack the tar.gz file into the folder
tar -xvf ./powershell-6.0.1-linux-arm32.tar.gz -C ~/powershell

# Start PowerShell
~/powershell/pwsh

PowerShell should launch correctly, and from there you can install the PowerCLI module, as per VMware’s instructions. Be aware that this will take several minutes to run.

#Install PowerCLI Module
Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -Scope CurrentUser

And that’s it, you can now run supported PowerCLI commands from your Raspberry Pi!

Once I get my home lab a little more functional then I can test this further.

Cheers

Chris