vSphere folders, are the VM's powered on?

[ben_turner_]

I have an interesting request at the moment that requires a dashboard to display whether a group of VM's is powered on or not.

On the face of it the request seemed simple enough, but i am struggling to come up with an elegant solution. Let’s say I have 2 folders in vCenter and VM's in folder 1 are powered off and folder 2 are powered on. I want to show a simple dashboard that would show this. I have tried to use custom groups with the descendants of the relative folders, but it's not as elegant as I would like.

I think I am missing something, I then thought about a super metric to give me a single yes (if all the VM's are powered on) or no (if all the VM's are powered off) but I cannot filter on a VM folder here.

I cannot see the wood for the trees, can anyone think of a simpler way to implement this?

[daphnissov]

There's a collected property for each VM on the power state. Why not use a heat map per folder to show this status where green equals on and red equals off?

[ben_turner_]

I actually ended up taking an existing view in vROps - "Virtual Machines Power State Distribution" and using this in a view widget on the dashboard for a new group created based on the vCenter folder membership.

The complexity came with the crazy folder structure in the inventory and duplicated names in multiple vCenter's but the end result delivered the requirements. vSphere tags might be the answer for this one to be more simplistic.

Thanks for the response though!