Install Powershell and PowerCLI on Linux

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I have been working on setting up a nested VSphere lab in VMWare Workstation the past few weeks and wanted to have a simple jump box with minimum resources that I could use to test out PowerCLI scripts I have been writing. As I am very familiar with working with Linux operating systems and now that Microsoft supports PowerShell Core on Linux distributions I wanted to see if I could get PowerShell and PowerCLI installed on two Linux test servers (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and CentOS 7) that I have setup already in the lab.

Add the PowerShell Repository

To install PowerShell Core I first had to add the official Microsoft repository.

CentOS 7


Ubuntu 18.04


Install PowerShell

Now that the repositories were configured the next step was to install PowerShell. 

CentOS 7


Ubuntu 18.04


Install PowerCLI

Now that PowerShell was successfully installed I could start it and install PowerCLI.


Since I am using the default self-signed certificate on my lab VCenter server I got an error that the SSL connection could not be established. To fix that  I set the PowerCLI configuration to ignore invalid certificates. I also set the Participate in VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program ("CEIP") to false and disabled the Web Operations timeout.

After setting the PowerCLI configuration I was successfully able to connect to my lab VCenter server.


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