I have a script that I use to gather our VM inventory across our 7 vCenters that has been working great for a few years now. Suddenly about 2 weeks ago the one vCenter stopped responding to get-tagassignment correctly, and is now throwing the following error:
Get-TagAssignment : 7/23/2021 11:32:08 AM Get-TagAssignment Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:1 char:1
+ Get-TagAssignment
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-TagAssignment], VimException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Core_BaseCmdlet_UnknownError,VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Cmdlets.Commands.Tagging.GetTagAssignment
So here is all the relevant information:
The connection is 2 separate Connect-viServer commands (as we have our Prod vCenters isolated from Dev/QA)
eg.)
Connect-viserver -Server $ProdvCenter -Alllinked -credentials $prodCreds
Connect-Viserver -Server $DevQAvCenter -Alllinked -credentials $DevQACreds
and if I do a $Global:defaultviservers I get a list of all 7 of the vCenters
The command that is being used to gather our tags locally so I can parse them later is
$AllVMTags = Get-tagassignment -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
and failing that have also tried
Foreach($Site in $Global:allvCenters) {
Write-Host "Gathering tags from: $Site"
$AllVMTags += Get-TagAssignment -Server $Site -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}
and also
$Tagcats = Get-TagCategory -server $vCenter
ForEach($cat in $Tagcats) {
Write-Host "Gathering Tags from" $cat
$AllVMTags += Get-TagAssignment -Category $cat
}
All with the same results. The gather the tags from 6 of the 7 vCenters, but not the 7th.
the only way I have managed to get it to work is:
$AllVMTags = Get-VM * | foreach {Get-Tagassignment -entity $_}
But it takes approximately 2-3x as long as any of the other ways to pull the data, and with 3000+ VMs it really adds to the runtime.
I have tried on multiple machines and they are all running the following
> Get-Module VMWare.powercli -ListAvailable | select Name, version
Name Version
---- -------
VMware.PowerCLI 12.3.0.17860403
VMware.PowerCLI 12.1.0.17009493
> $PSVersionTable.PSVersion
Major Minor Build Revision
----- ----- ----- --------
5 1 18362 1593
all of the vCenters are running 6.7.0 Build 18010599 (updated around the time of this issue starting, but 6 of 7 still working is a little odd)
If I run 'get-tagassignment -category Environment' it works fine, but if I use it in the full loop to get all the tag categories it still fails.
I have rebooted both the script server and the affected VCSA to see if thats the problem to no avail.
Unfortunately I am at a loss as the error is quite vague about which object is not set.
