Clone roles between two virtual center servers

So i wanted to make a copy of a role that is in vc1. I wanted to have it in vc2.
Basically you can just open two vSphere clients, one to vc1 and other to vc2, and just select each privilege that is in this role and select it on second window. (click,click,click…) Yeah, if you have 1 role to copy, with very small amount of privileges then it is not such issue. But what if you have more?
Ok, let’s start from the beginning.
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Sitauation:
VC1 —|
. |
. RoleA

VC2 —|
. |
. RoleA
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We want to copy roleA from VC1 to VC2.
First check if your powercli runs in multi VC mode.
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
PowerCLI C:\Get-PowerCLIConfiguration

Proxy Policy Default Server
Mode
———— —————
UseSystemProxy Multiple
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If not, set the default server mode to multi.
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -DefaultVIServerMode multiple -Confirm:$false
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Once this is set you can now connect to multiple VC servers. Since -server handles array we can do:
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
Connect-viserver -server "VC1","VC2" -credential (get-credential)
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Role that will be cloned has name RoleA within VC1, let’s view it:
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
Get-VIrole -Name "RoleA" -Server VC1 | fl *
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We can see it’s description,Name,ID and what will be most important for us PrivilegeList
Let’s store the privilege list for this roleA from VC1. We will store those privileges ids as a string in string array.
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
[string[]]$privsforRoleAfromVC1=Get-VIPrivilege -Role (Get-VIRole -Name "RoleA" -server VC1) |%{$_.id}
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Once we have the privileges ids, we can now create blank role in VC2.
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
New-VIRole -name "RoleA" -Server VC2
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We will now populate privileges in our empty RoleA within VC2:
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
Set-VIRole -role (get-virole -Name "RoleA" -Server VC2) -AddPrivilege (get-viprivilege -id $privsforRoleAfromVC1 -server VC2)
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If everything went fine we should have now 1:1 copy of our RoleA. Let’s check it:
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
(Get-VIRole -Name RoleA -Server VC1).PrivilegeList.Count
(Get-VIRole -Name RoleA -Server VC2).PrivilegeList.Count
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If you don’t want to use this additional variable that holds privileges you can put it directly in one line
[sourcecode language=”powershell”]
Set-VIRole -role (get-virole -Name "RoleA" -Server VC2) -AddPrivilege (get-viprivilege -id (Get-VIPrivilege -Role (Get-VIRole -Name "RoleA" -server VC1) |%{$_.id}) -server VC2)
[/sourcecode]
That’s it 😉