Hello,
This is an extension of my previous thread that was answered here:
Re: Remote PowerCLI - GetPool from Horizon View Connection Server
I have get-hvpool up and running to my satisfaction. Automated the login credentials, connection server process, and parse out the return object with few problems. Now I am searching for a replacement to the previous local command of "get-DesktopVM". It seems like "Get-HVMachine" is the appropriate replacement for remote PowerCLI calls. However I am not able to complete simple queries for machines from the same Horizon View server.
The results:
What have i done so far:
- Tried all variations of the arguments based on the get-help results i can think of
- I am using Module VMware.Hv.Helper 1.1 now.
- Get-help does not appear to have the information that I need to return any results.
- I can find any extra info on get-hvmachine in the View API.
- The sample script Horizon View Example Desktop Script.ps1 does work by itself. If I copy the logic from the example into mine it works too. Not that its stopping me but it looks like too much overhead to run this simple command compared to Get-HVPool that works by itself.
Am I overlooking something simple that would allow me to query this information without using the full method from the example script?
remove userID info, add View version info tag
Accepted Solutions
Same kind of response as before (this time from VSphere console for better text resolution):
Granted we do not have any machines named 'MyVM' in your example, but I get the same result when searching for actual VMs that do exist in our environment. Adding wildcard/*'s doesn't seem to impact the results either.
edit - remove userID
Yup, I am signing in with Connect-HVServer with the same credentials I use to log into the View Admin interface. All areas of View are available to me with that ID.
For comparison here is the helper script that does successfully return info on the machines (doesn't seem to format correctly but the key parts are here):
Function Get-HVDesktop {
Param (
$State
$ViewAPI = $global:DefaultHVServers[0].ExtensionData
$query_service = New-Object "Vmware.Hv.QueryServiceService"
$query = New-Object "Vmware.Hv.QueryDefinition"
$query.queryEntityType = 'MachineSummaryView'
if ($State) {
[VMware.Hv.QueryFilter []] $filters = @()
foreach ($filterstate in $State) {
$filters += new-object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterEquals -property @{'memberName' = 'base.basicState'; 'value' = $filterstate}
$orFilter = new-object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterOr -property @{'filters' = $filters}
$query.Filter = $orFilter
$Desktops = $query_service.QueryService_Query($ViewAPI,$query)
$Desktops.Results.Base
Based on this it would appear that the same QueryService_Query getting called from the built in Get-HVDesktop is using 2 arguments, ViewAPI and a Query. The Query doesn't seem to be anything that would require credentials. That suggests the problem is with calling or creating the ViewAPI object, or the Query_service itself. Yet nowhere in here are there prompts for credentials.
If I break it down:
$global:DefaultHVServers[0].ExtensionData will return a list of methods
New-Object "Vmware.Hv.QueryServiceService" will return a QueryService object
New-Object "Vmware.Hv.QueryDefinition" will give me an empty query object
$query.queryEntityType = 'MachineSummaryView' will enter some data into the QueryEntityType field but also confirms the kind of info that will be returned
Seems pretty straight forward but now I notice that I am not calling the same module against the View Connection server as I thought. Instead this is a query is using the normal View API against (what I assume is) vCenter that retrieves the same info. Now I can go back to the View API documentation for more info.
I noticed another clue now that I found QueryService_Query in the View API documentation. The exception I am receiving is "EntityNotFound - Thrown if any specified entity cannot be found." There is a different exception for permission issues " InsufficientPermission - Thrown if the user does not have sufficient permission to perform the operation."
So then I started to pull apart the actual module looking at the specific line that was throwing the exception. It was our friend the QueryService_Query and it was getting called twice when no parameters were fed into it. but By giving Get-HVMachine one parameter of 'myVM' I did not receive any errors and actually got a clean result.
Here is the summarized discovery progression:
It seems that get-HVMachine can only search for specific machine names. Although its coded to handle wildcards something blows up every time you try to use them in the machinename parameter.
TLDR; Get-HVMachine seems to not be handling wildcards correctly. If you query for specific machines by name then you get results. What is the proper syntax to return a list of all the VMs from a View Connection Server?