Powershell 3.0 - Workflows - Limit number of parallel execution

Question

I am cloning VMs on ESX server from template. Simplified code looks like this:

Workflow Create-VM {
  $List = 1..500
  foreach -parallel ($Elem in $List)
  {
            


        

Answer 1

A trivial solution is to divide the list into smaller chunks and use that as input for parallel foreach. Like so,

Workflow Create-VM {
  $List = 1..500
  # Calclulate indexes to get elements 0,3; 4,7; 8,11 and so on
  # Use the .. operator to extract those elements from $list and pass
  # 'em to foreach -parallel processing part
  for($i=0;$i -le $List.Count-4; $i+=4) { 
    foreach -parallel ($Elem in $list[$i..($i+3)]) {
      # Create VM ...
      # Configure created VM ..
    } 
  }
}