Accepted Solutions
Hi,
I can give you only few tips and rough concepts because I dont know the details.
First, this screams for PowerCLI, below you'll get some commands. If you're not familiar with PowerCLI/Powershell I highly recommend to get a grasp on it.
Second I'll assume that orphaned files = not used files. If that's not the case, you can always rename/move file instead of deleting and wait for those phonecalls/tickets 
Third, since we are going to work on files on datastores, we'll utilize "vmstores" PSDrive. Get-PSdrive cmdlet will give you all drives you have, one of them is vmstores 
C:\Windows\system32> Get-PSDrive
Name Used (GB) Free (GB) Provider Root CurrentLocation
---- --------- --------- -------- ---- ---------------
Alias Alias
C 52,39 44,97 FileSystem C:\ Windows\system32
Cert Certificate \
D 218,60 149,80 FileSystem D:\
E FileSystem E:\
Env Environment
Function Function
HKCU Registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER
HKLM Registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Variable Variable
vi VimInventory \LastConnectedVCenterServer
vis VimInventory \
vmstore VimDatastore \LastConnectedVCenterServer
vmstores VimDatastore \
WSMan WSMan
To get to your datastores do typical "cd":
cd vmstores:\your_vcenter\your_cluster
On each level you can do "ls" or "cmd". Tab completion works on everything so use it
From now all depends on what you already have and how it looks. Does those files have some naming pattern containing VM name or other information ("backup", "tmp" etc)? Do you have those names stored somewhere? In text file or csv?
I assume that you have file list in text file. So simplest method would be scanning through all datastores and all files. As you can imagine it is very time and resource consuming, so not recommended at all
#we're importing filenames to variable
$oldfiles = Get-Content your_text_file.txt
cd vmstores:\your_vcenter\your_cluster
$oldfiles | ForEach-Object {
#we're recursivly looking for file stored in $_ special variable (current object)
$deleteme = Get-ChildItem $_ -Recurse
#deleting the file
Remove-Item $deleteme.PSPath
}
If filenames which you already have can somehow correlate directly to VM, then we could use smarter approach.
Let's say we have file testVM001-bak003.vmdk and VMname is testVM001. We can remove all chars after 9th char and then work on it:
#we're importing filenames to variable
$oldfiles = Get-Content your_text_file.txt
$oldfiles | ForEach-Object {
#getting VM name
$vmname = $_.Remove(9)
#getting VM path
$vmpath = (Get-VM -Name $vmname |Get-Datastore).DatastoreBrowserPath
#combining full path
$fullpath = $vmpath + "\" + $vmname
cd $fullpath
#deleting the file
Remove-Item ./$_
}
Those are simple ideas, hope it helps.
Hi,
I can give you only few tips and rough concepts because I dont know the details.
First, this screams for PowerCLI, below you'll get some commands. If you're not familiar with PowerCLI/Powershell I highly recommend to get a grasp on it.
Second I'll assume that orphaned files = not used files. If that's not the case, you can always rename/move file instead of deleting and wait for those phonecalls/tickets
Third, since we are going to work on files on datastores, we'll utilize "vmstores" PSDrive. Get-PSdrive cmdlet will give you all drives you have, one of them is vmstores
C:\Windows\system32> Get-PSDrive
Name Used (GB) Free (GB) Provider Root CurrentLocation
---- --------- --------- -------- ---- ---------------
Alias Alias
C 52,39 44,97 FileSystem C:\ Windows\system32
Cert Certificate \
D 218,60 149,80 FileSystem D:\
E FileSystem E:\
Env Environment
Function Function
HKCU Registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER
HKLM Registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Variable Variable
vi VimInventory \LastConnectedVCenterServer
vis VimInventory \
vmstore VimDatastore \LastConnectedVCenterServer
vmstores VimDatastore \
WSMan WSMan
To get to your datastores do typical "cd":
cd vmstores:\your_vcenter\your_cluster
On each level you can do "ls" or "cmd". Tab completion works on everything so use it
From now all depends on what you already have and how it looks. Does those files have some naming pattern containing VM name or other information ("backup", "tmp" etc)? Do you have those names stored somewhere? In text file or csv?
I assume that you have file list in text file. So simplest method would be scanning through all datastores and all files. As you can imagine it is very time and resource consuming, so not recommended at all
#we're importing filenames to variable
$oldfiles = Get-Content your_text_file.txt
cd vmstores:\your_vcenter\your_cluster
$oldfiles | ForEach-Object {
#we're recursivly looking for file stored in $_ special variable (current object)
$deleteme = Get-ChildItem $_ -Recurse
#deleting the file
Remove-Item $deleteme.PSPath
}
If filenames which you already have can somehow correlate directly to VM, then we could use smarter approach.
Let's say we have file testVM001-bak003.vmdk and VMname is testVM001. We can remove all chars after 9th char and then work on it:
#we're importing filenames to variable
$oldfiles = Get-Content your_text_file.txt
$oldfiles | ForEach-Object {
#getting VM name
$vmname = $_.Remove(9)
#getting VM path
$vmpath = (Get-VM -Name $vmname |Get-Datastore).DatastoreBrowserPath
#combining full path
$fullpath = $vmpath + "\" + $vmname
cd $fullpath
#deleting the file
Remove-Item ./$_
}
Those are simple ideas, hope it helps.