Query around a) VM created date b) VM last-turned-on date

[piglet]

Folks,

First off, may I thank you chaps (and ladies) for many of the interesting posts that I'm seeing on this particular forum. I frequently come here looking for the answer to one problem, and leave with solutions to 3 other things that I didn't know were causing me problems. Great stuff indeed.

Anyhow, on to the main event... similar to Mr. pfuhli here (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/135962), I like the idea of weekly/monthly reporting for my overlords. In part this is motivated by showing how clever I am, but more technically it's to do with capacity planning and such like. It would be great to have a weekly mail that stated something like:

a) x new VMs have been created in the last week (followed by list of names)

b) This adds to y VMs that have been created in the past 4 weeks (or calendar month, or whatever, obvsiouly same mechanism as "a)")

c) z VMs have not been turned on for over 12 weeks, and decommissioing should be considered.

Now, while a snapshot seems to have a .created property, I can't see the same thing for a VM. Does it exist? If not, can we do something clever around the age of a .vmx file, or parse logs/VC events for a relevant entry around VM creation? Option c) may require ingenuity too, since we're essentially looking for something that's absent, or non-present...

Suggestions welcome.

Many thanks,

piglet

[LucD]

There don't seem to be properties that would allow one to calculate the age of a guest.

In the SDK the VirtualMachineConfigInfo has a property named " modified" but that only shows the last time the guest's configuration was changed.

The only alternative I can see is to use a CustomProperty (see ).

That would allow you to create for example a CustomProperty called "CreatedOn" with a date value.

Then it would be easy to run a script that gets the value, calculates the difference in number of days and puts the guest in the correct report.

[angoletti1]

Hi,

what do you think about using the created date of the VMX file and the last changed date of the first VMDK file?

Not a very good solution, but maybe one the could work.

[CUSNE]

Have you found a way to do this? I have been asked to provide this information and am not having any luck finding a solution.

Thanks

Mark

[piglet]

Hi Mark,

I ended up rooting about in the VC DB, and came up with the following syntax to run as a query:

select CREATE_TIME, USERNAME, VM_NAME, HOST_NAME, DATACENTER_NAME

from VPX_EVENT

Where EVENT_TYPE = 'vim.event.VmCreatedEvent' OR EVENT_TYPE = 'vim.event.VMClonedEvent' AND CREATE_TIME > '2007-06-01'

While this could be driven by PS, I ended up doing things more manually.

The requirement for the .vmclonedevent entries stems from the fact that a 'new' VM from the PoV of the DB seems to be one that has been manually created new, not pne imported from Converter nor cloned.

Hope this is of help.

piglet

[kcvman]

When running against my DB, I received multiple creation dates for the same guest. I did verify this by having DRS vmotion a guest to another host within a cluster, re-ran the query, and after the vmition by DRS, that host had 2 seperate created entries on 2 seperate hosts.

Still hoping for a solution on this...

[Anaxander]

<bump>

Anyone find a solution to this? This would be really good information to have.

[alanrenouf]

This can now be achieved using the get-vievent cmdlet as shown below where we get the last 5 days of VMs created and cloned:

Get-VIEvent -maxsamples 10000 -Start (Get-Date).AddDays(-5) | where {$_.Gettype().Name -eq "VmCreatedEvent" -or $_.Gettype().Name -eq "VmBeingClonedEvent"}

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for Correct or Helpful.

Alan Renouf

[EdConde]

I am getting time out errors, is there a way to increase the time out?

thanks!

[robincm]

If most of your VMs are running Windows then you might find my post on historic reporting of VM creation date (actually OS install date) useful:

Get VMware VM creation date (kind of)

Will fairly easily give you a nice graph for your capacity planning/amusement/horror.