I have a new project where I need to automate a series of actions on virtual machines using PowerShell. It seems that there is waaaayyyy too much information out there. The vast majority of blog postings and articles seem to be either (1) generic cmdlet reference pages or (2) overly simplistic sample scripts that do something very specific.
What I am looking for are some good starter articles that cover the following
The basic object architecture and relationships between the objects. For example, I was looking to get information on a vm's disk(s) and by accident discovered that I have to go to the VirtualHardDisk property of the VirtualDiskDrives property of the VirtualMachine object. Why three levels down? What is the difference between VirtualDiskDrive and VirtualHardDisk?
The difference between the Hyper-V cmdlets and the cmdlets that come with System Center, and when to use one over the other. Is there even overlap?
I understand that this posting is very broad but I really hope somebody can point to a good specific starting point to learn from.