Hi Doug,

Thanks for this.

I have been digging in the API extensively trying to extend lbert's excellent ESXi provisioning script to add licensing, SSL certificate publication, support for ESX as well as ESXi, etc.

One thing I want to do is either rename or remove local datastores so they don't accidentally get used during VM provisioning.

Right now, I'm just looking for datastores that end with :storage1 but that's not terribly reliable.

I could wait until I get this added to VC and then enumerate like you suggest which might be interesting.

I will have a look at the multipleHostAccess thingie. That might also just do the trick.

I'll will post the finished script... someday.... when its done....

Thanks....

These functions provide assistance dealing with Datastores. I have included the code in this post and in an attached file.

Comments and improvements are welcomed.

All functions, with some usage information and a sample, is in the attachment

Get-DatastoreHost -Datastore $DS -IsConnected $True returns a list of VIM VMHost objects that have access to the store. Use IsConnected if you only want ones that are properly alive.

function Get-DatastoreHost {
Param(
[http://VMware.VimAutomation.Client20.DatastoreImpl|http://VMware.VimAutomation.Client20.DatastoreImpl] $Datastore,
[<b>boolean</b>] $IsConnected=$True
)
($Datastore | Get-View).Host | ForEach-Object { get-view -id $_.Key } | `
Where-Object { (-not $IsConnected) -or ($_.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq "connected") }
}

Get-LocalDatastore -VMHost $Host returns a list of VIToolkit Datastore objects which are hosted on devices of type ParallelSCSIHBA or BlockHBA. I think these are only owned by a local ESX server. I wanted this code to reliably rename local datastores so they aren't accidentally selected when operations teams provisions VMs

function Get-LocalDatastore {
  Param(
    [http://VMware.VimAutomation.Client20.VMHostImpl|http://VMware.VimAutomation.Client20.VMHostImpl] $VMHost    
    )
    $LocalDevices=(Get-VMHostStorage -VMHost $VMHost | Get-View).StorageDeviceInfo.HostBusAdapter | `
      Where-Object { `
        ($_.Key -like "key-vim.host.ParallelSCSIHBA-*") -or `
        ($_.Key -like "key-vim.host.BlockHBA-*") `
        } | %{ [string]($_.Device) }
    Get-Datastore -VMHost $VMHost | Where-Object { 
      (($_ | Get-View).Info.vmfs.extent | %{ ([string]$_.DiskName).split(":",2)[0]} ) `
      -contains $LocalDevices
      }
  }

Get-DatastoreDatacenter -Datastore $DS There are some (e.g., vifs.pl) processes that insist on a Datacenter in some cases. This returns the datacenter VIToolkit object a given Datastore is in. This could also be easily adapted to hosts.

function Get-DatastoreDatacenter {
  Param(
    $Datastore
  )
  Get-Datacenter | Where-Object {
    (($_ | Get-View).Datastore | %{ (Get-View -Id $_).Summary.Url}) `
      -contains (($Datastore | Get-View).Summary.Url)
    }
  }

Edited on Oct 10 to replace completely wrong Get-DatastoreDatacenter