Clone 50 vm's using powercli

[Matheen]

Hi all

I have few esx4.1i hosts running in vcentre 4.1. storage is provided by EMC SAN. I have a base VM,

I would like to clone 50 vm's from that base vm but with a uniquename.

For example my basevm name is BASEVM. I would like to have 50 vm's created with names like

newvm1

newvm2

...

...

newvm50

Can someone please let me know the command to clone 50 vm's from the base vm?

Regards

Matheen

[ykalchev]

Take a look at New-VM cmdlet and Example 4.

You can use foreach loop to create 50 clones of the base vm:

$vm = Get-VM BASEVM

$vmhost = Ge-VMHost

$datastore = Get-datastore <san_datastore_name>

1..50 | % { New-VM -Name newvm$_ -VM $vm -Datastore $datastore -VMHost $vmhost }

Regards,

Yasen

[Matheen]

Hi Yasen

Thanks for the prompt reply. I will give this a try and let you know.  BTW after declaring all the variables as you mentioned in your post and if I type

1..50 | % { New-VM -Name newvm$_ -VM $vm -Datastore $datastore -VMHost $vmhost }

Will it create 50 hosts with unique name or the same name?

Regards

Matheen

[ykalchev]

$_ is a Ps variables pointning to the current element of the foreach loop. So

1..50 | % { write-Host newvm$_ }

will write

newvm1

newvm2

newvm3

....

newvm50

[Matheen]

Thanks Yasen. Your script is perfect. I put the below script

$vm = Get-VM BASEVM

$vmhost = Ge-VMHost

$datastore = Get-datastore <san_datastore_name>

1..50 | % { New-VM -Name newvm$_ -VM $vm -Datastore $datastore -VMHost $vmhost }

it started cloning vm's starting from

newvm01

newvm02.

...

But I don't understand what 1..50 | % { write-Host newvm$_ } this command does? Please explain

Thank you so much for the script. I would like to learn power cli scripting. Can you please suggest some good sources or video trainings?

Regards

Matheen

[Matheen]

Hi Yasen

Also quickly.. If I want to move all these newly cloned to a resource pool (all at once) what command I use. I found out from the help I can use

Move-VM -VM VM -Destination ResourcePool 

But this will move one vm at a time, isn't it?

Please let me know

Regards

Matheen

[LucD]

Yes, they will be moved to the resourcepool one by one.

That has nothing to do with PowerCLI but is because of the underlying RelocateVM_Task method that is used.

That method is called on a single VirtualMachine object, not on a collection of VirtualMachine objects.

And a move to a resource pool doesn't normally take that long

If you want your script to continue, while the guests are moved in the background, you can use the RunAsync parameter

Move-VM -VM VM* -Destination ResourcePool -RunAsync