Mass upgrade virtual hardware in 5.5?

[hostasaurus]

Just curious if, via the completely ridiculous web interface that makes you want to kill yourself, it is possible to set your vm's to be scheduled for hardware compatibility upgrade on next reboot like you can individually by editing and checking the schedule for next reboot box.  I don't want to take the vm's offline, I want to just mark all 600+ vm's in our vcenter cluster to be upgraded at next reboot.  This process is horribly slow with the stupid flash-based interface.  I'll have to pay someone to sit there pointing and clicking for a complete day to go through them all.

[fpineau]

Have you tried using something other than the web client?  PowerCLI would be excellent for this.  Here's a link to a guide:

http://psvmware.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/upgrade-virtual-machine-hardware-using-powercli/

Here's a script that's a lot more complicated but it does a lot more, too.

http://www.getshifting.com/wiki/powerclivmupgrade

[hostasaurus]

Yep, unfortunately PowerCLI is powerless in this case because the best it can do is rely on the UpgradeVM_Task function from the API which has not been updated for 5.5 to support the new feature of scheduling the update to occur at the VM's next reboot.  With the current UpgradeVM_Task function, if the power state is anything other than poweredOff, it fails.  I want to set the upgrade to occur like the 5.5 web interface allows, and let it happen when the vm's are rebooted on their own maintenance schedules.  Thanks for the pointers though.

[markdjones82 · Accepted solution]

You should be able to go to the related objects and highlight all your virtual machines and choose schedule for them.

[hostasaurus]

Perfect; thanks.  I can go to my cluster and related objects and schedule every single VM for upgrade at next reboot.  This is the first good thing the new interface has done for us lol.

[markdjones82]

I would agree and I hadn't actually seen this till you posted it!  It is pretty cool new feature.

[markdjones82]

Hi, I was browsing aroudn and found a post from RVD where he actually has the API calls so you can script it outif you need to:

Re: Schedule VM Compatibility Upgrade