Running commands on VMs remotely

Question

Hi Everyone
New to all of this so please bear with me!
Starting a new project and looking to compare between the use of Hyper V and ESXi.  
The project is to grab vms regardless of state, turn them on and execute scripts stored on a vm drive. The script execution has to be performed / issued by a user. C# is the main underlying code but we can potentially put in references to use powershell
scripts / whatever else if we can achieve this using hyper v.
I know from doing a bit of reading on ESXi that we can do this using a number of ways - vmrun to start, stop and run commands on the actual vm itself. using other vmware libraries and APIs.
I have read that powershell commands include starting vms, taking snapshots, shutting down vms but I was wondering if we can get into the actual VM remotely / somehow in-order to, for example, run a script which is stored on that VMs C drive.
Has anyone tried this / is it do-able? -  I have had no luck finding any examples of what we need. 
Kind Regards,
Ashley

Answer 1

I have a few things that I have done historically.
Really, you have two options.  a WMI (API) call or a WinRM / PowerShell remoting call.
The difference between the two is 1) security settings and 2) ease of use.
For WinRM the security needs to be more open then WMI.  But, it is far easier to script as you simply open a remote session and you keep scripting along in the remote shell (the tricky part is pulling values back to the local session).  With WMI
you always get the values back since you never spawn into another session.
Below is a WinRM example of using WinRM and returning some value back:
It executes a WMI command on the remote machine to fin the file I am looking for (as that is faster) and then I read the file with the script.
# This block of script executes remotely and returns the content of hte CtxSta.config file.>
$sta = invoke-command -Session $s -ScriptBlock {
$staArray = get-wmiobject CIM_DataFile -filter 'Extension="config" and FileName="CtxSta"'
# If IIS Integration is installed there could be multiples, this is the one that CSG is hard coded to use.
foreach ($e in $staArray) {
if ($e.Path -match "citrix\\system32") {
$sta = $e
get-content -path ([string]$sta.Name)
# We have returned to local execution.
foreach ($e in $sta) {
switch -wildcard ($e) {
"UID*" {
$e = $e -replace "UID", ""
$e = $e -replace "=", ""
$e = $e -replace " ", ""
$staId = $e
$staId
Brian Ehlert
http://ITProctology.blogspot.com
Learn. Apply. Repeat.