In today's article, I'll be showing how to upgrade the VM hardware version using PowerCLI for either one VM or multiple VMs at a time to version 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, or any version. Additionally, I'll show you how to target a specific group of VMs by name or based on their location in a given cluster using a one-line command.

VMware regularly releases updates to its Powershell module, known as PowerCLI. While in the past you had to go to the vmware.com website, download the executable - by the way, you still can for older versions - and install PowerCLI, you no longer have to since there's an easier way directly from a PowerShell console.

One of the major benefits of working with VMs is that you can easily take a snapshot, make a change, test out your change or changes, and if something goes horribly wrong, you can easily revert back your changes at a click of a button. Backup software also uses snapshots.

VMware documentation is excellent, but not if you're a beginner with PowerCLI. While you will find documentation on how to configure SNMP for your ESXi hosts, the way it's presented is not very clear and will leave you scratching your head in confusion since you'll be thinking how does this configure SNMP on all my ESXi hosts?