Newbie Question: Listing VMs Configuration and What Datastores

[wardla]

Hi

I am new to using powercli How do I list all VMs in a certain datacenter, their memory, Procs and what datastores they reside on.

I know you can use get-vm | select-object name, NumCPU, MemoryMB  but if I add DatastoreIdList as well it doesnt seem to work.  What am I missing

Many Thanks

Laurence

[LucD]

First check which properties are available in a VM object.

Do

Get-VM MyVM | Get-Member

The DatastoreIdList property is an array of datastore Id (duh).

You can expand such a complex property with the ExpandProperty parameter

Get-VM MyVM | Select -ExpandProperty DatastoreIdList

But that doesn't allow you to combine this complex property with other properties.

That's where calculated properties come in.

Get-VM MyVM | Select Name,@{N="DS";E={[string]::join(',',($_.datastoreidlist|%{$_}))}}

But you would probably want to see the names of these datastores.

Then you have to use the ID to fetch the datastore object

Get-VM MyVM | Select Name,@{N="DS";E={[string]::join(',',($_.datastoreidlist|%{(Get-View -Id $_).Name}))}}

That looks complex, but if you know how it was constructed it's quite easy

[wardla]

Many thansk for your reply.

If I wanted to also include description field and export this to to CSV.  Would I just use the | export-csv filename.csv -notypeinformation command

[LucD · Accepted solution]

That is correct, you could do

Get-VM MyVM | Select Name,@{N="DS";E={[string]::join(',',($_.datastoreidlist|%{(Get-View -Id $_).Name}))}},Description | 
    Export-Csv "C:\test.csv" -NoTypeInformation -UseCulture

Just watch out if the separator for the CSV happens to be a comma in your culture, then you will probably have to adapt the separator in the Join method!

[wardla]

Hi,

Many thanks for a quick repsonse.  Really helpful.

How do you recommend I learn powercli

Regards

Laurence

[LucD]

There are several resources available. See also the blogroll in the official PowerCLI blog.

There's Hal's book, albeit written for an older release, still a good intro to PowerCLI.

There's the PowerCLI Reference, which is a bit more advanced and covers how to tackle all aspects of your vSphere environment with PowerCLI.

There is Appendix A from the PowerCLI Reference, that didn't make it into the book due to size constraints, that is available for free.

If you are looking for PowerShell intros, have a look at the resources mentioned in my post ,called My PS Library