Running PowerShell in VMware Orchestrator – updated

Updated 7/29/2010 – I have added a new follow up post this post regarding another related hanging issue. Please make sure to check it out.

This is a copy of my comment in the VMware Communities, but some times the Google search results for items in this blog show up and the ones for the communities do not.

The original problem is that PowerShell scripts hang when running them in Orchestrator.

I have spent some time on this and have a way to make it work. For some reason when run this way the $input variable in Powershell is expecting a pipeline and I believe it just waits for pipelined input.

The $input variable is of type System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.Pipeline instead of the standard System.Collections.ArrayList+ArrayListEnumeratorSimple when running scripts. I have tried using the methods in the Pipeline class to clear things up to no avail. I have also tried using the input property on the Orchestrator Command class, but I could not get it to work. I am just getting started with Orchestrator though, so it may be my lack of knowledge.

As a workaround you can input NUL to the script or command using cmd.exe.

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// Run a command
command = new Command("cmd /c powershell.exe -Command dir variable: >> c:\\orchestrator\\input.out < NUL");
command.execute(true);

//Run a script
command = new Command("cmd /c powershell.exe -File c:\\orchestrator\\input.ps1 < NUL");
command.execute(true);