Restrict VM's display name

[GuilhermeStela]

Someone know if it's possible to resctrict the change of display name of a VM?

I don't want to leave a VM with special Characters into your name, for example VM(1). the parentesis bother me on scripts and searches...

[CRad14]

Hmm, Well I am not sure the PowerCLI forums is the best place for this...unless of course you wanted a script to find vms with displaynames that have special characters.

I am not sure what you are asking can be done, short of changing the permissions so individuals simply cannot change VM display names

[LucD]

Restricting the characters used in a VM name is afaik not possible.

This will display the VMs that have, what regex considers non-word characters, in their names.

The regex word characters are 'A-Za-z0-9_' (not including the quotes)

Get-VM | where {$_.Name -match [regex]"\W+"} | Select Name 

Does this list the VMs you are after ?

[GuilhermeStela]

I'm afraid not Luc, I ran the script you mentioned and returns all my VMs

I want to return only the VMs that have any special character in the name, like "$" or "("

We use a foreign backup tool here and it fails if some VM has special character in the name.

EDITED:

     I forgot to talk... we can't have spaces between tha name too. Like "My VM" or "VMware HealthAnalyzer"... the spaces were the last problema related by the backup team.

[LucD · Accepted solution]

Try this variation

Get-VM | where {$_.Name -match [regex]"[\$\(\)\s]+"} | Select Name 

[GuilhermeStela]

Nice! This time it worked fine.

Could you explain the functioning of this  arguments?

[LucD]

It uses a regular expression (regex) and in the mask I specify the characters ($ and both parenthesis and any white-space) you want to look for.

Since these are meta-characters for regex, they need to be escaped by the back-slash

[GuilhermeStela]

I read about regex and seems very complicated at the begginning but finally undestood.

Now i have to map all special characters and put in the expression.

Tks again Luc. =D

[LucD]

When you work with RegEx expressions it's handy to use a tool to validate your  pattern.

Something like this for example.

I personally use RegExBuddy regularly.