I recently needed to export a list of all the Linux VMs in a rather large vSphere environment spanning multiple vCenters (and the entire globe), and I wanted to include information about which virtual datacenter each VM lived in to make it easier to map VMs to their physical location.
I've got a Connect-vCenters
function that I use to quickly log into multiple vCenters at once. That then enables me to run a single query across the entire landscape - but what query? There isn't really a direct way to get datacenter information out of the results generated by Get-VM
; I could run an additional Get-Datacenter
query against each returned VM object but that doesn't sound very efficient.
What I came up with is using Get-Datacenter
to enumerate each virtual datacenter, and then list the VMs matching my query within:
1$linuxVms = foreach( $datacenter in ( Get-Datacenter )) { 2 Get-Datacenter $datacenter | Get-VM | Where { $_.ExtensionData.Config.GuestFullName -notmatch "win" -and $_.Name -notmatch "vcls" } | ` 3 Select @{ N="Datacenter";E={ $datacenter.Name }}, 4 Name, 5 Notes, 6 @{ N="Configured OS";E={ $_.ExtensionData.Config.GuestFullName }}, # OS based on the .vmx configuration 7 @{ N="Running OS";E={ $_.Guest.OsFullName }}, # OS as reported by VMware Tools 8 @{ N="Powered On";E={ $_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn" }}, 9 @{ N="IP Address";E={ $_.ExtensionData.Guest.IpAddress }}10}11$linuxVms | Export-Csv -Path ./linuxVms.csv -NoTypeInformation -UseCulture
This gave me a CSV export with exactly the data I needed.