Is it possible to get the total number of VMs at a given point in time?

[bolsen]

Is there a command that will give me the total number of VMs (within the datacenter) at a given point in time? Say I want to know how many VMs we had 6 months ago and compare it to today. Is this possible?

[admin]

Is there a command that will give me the total number of VMs (within the datacenter) at a given point in time? Say I want to know how many VMs we had 6 months ago and compare it to today. Is this possible?

You can use the measure-object cmdlet, for example

get-datacenter mydatacenter | measure-object

. You can also use get-vmhost, get-resourcepool, etc.

The number of VMs is not tracked by VC or ESX, so unless you've got that in another database you probably won't be able to figure historical values out.

[sepeck]

That returns 1 for me... the number of datacenters. To get a count of the virtual servers on a datacenter you could do something like

(Get-Datacenter Name | get-vm).count

This does not get around the request for historical data to compare. For that, you'd have to run the command at regular intervals and track it.

Steven Peck

[admin · Accepted solution]

Sorry, it should read get-datacenter X | get-vm | measure-object.