remove certain folders from datastore over 7 days old

[ppgdtap]

I have a NFS datastore that has VM clones for backup purposes. These VM clones are not in the vCenter inventory. I would like to schedule something that only keeps 7 days worth of clones per VM. Also in this datastore the VM clones are named VMName_Backup_20160830221500, where the last element seems to have been generated using "Get-Date -Format yyyyMMddHHmmss"

I've put together the following, which can produce the list of datastore folders which should be deleted, but I am struggling remove the folders. Below "Remove-Folder $folder -DeletePermanently" is generating "Remove-Folder : Cannot bind parameter 'Folder'. Cannot convert the "VMware.Vim.HostDatastoreBrowserSearchResults" value of type "VMware.Vim.HostDatastoreBrowserSearchResults" to type

"VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Types.V1.Inventory.Folder"."

Is there a more elegant way to do this?

I tried this by extracting the clone date from the folder name etc.

$strDatastore = "Host0002_NFS_VMBack"

$CurrentDate = Get-Date -Format yyyyMMddHHmmss

If (-not (Get-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue))

    { Try { Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core -ErrorAction Stop }

    Catch { Write-Host "Unable to load PowerCLI, is it installed?" -ForegroundColor Red; Break }

    }

Connect-VIServer -Server localhost

$ds = Get-Datastore -Name $strDatastore | % {Get-View $_.Id}

$fileQueryFlags = New-Object VMware.Vim.FileQueryFlags

$fileQueryFlags.FileSize = $true

$fileQueryFlags.FileType = $true

$fileQueryFlags.Modification = $true

$searchSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.HostDatastoreBrowserSearchSpec

$searchSpec.details = $fileQueryFlags

$searchSpec.matchPattern = "*.vmdk"

$searchSpec.sortFoldersFirst = $true

$dsBrowser = Get-View $ds.browser

$rootPath = "[" + $ds.Name + "]"

$searchResult = $dsBrowser.SearchDatastoreSubFolders($rootPath, $searchSpec)

foreach ($folder in $searchResult)

{

    $folpath = $folder.FolderPath

    Write-Output $folpath

    $CloneDate = $folpath.substring($folpath.length - 11, 2) + "/" + $folpath.substring($folpath.length - 9, 2) + "/" + $folpath.substring($folpath.length - 15, 4)

    [datetime]$CloneDateTime = $CloneDate

    $DateDiff = (get-date).adddays(-7)

    if ($DateDiff -gt $CloneDateTime)

        {

            Remove-Folder $folder -DeletePermanently

        } else {

            Write-Output "To be retained as not over 7 days old!"

        }

}

Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$False

Remove-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core

[RvdNieuwendijk · Accepted solution]

The Remove-Folder cmdlet is for removing folders in the vSphere client. It is not for removing datastore folders. You can try to use the PowerCLI datastore provider to remove datastore folders. For example, you can use the following code to list the folders of a datastores.

$Datastore = Get-Datastore –Name Host0002_NFS_VMBack

New-PSDrive -Location $Datastore -Name ds -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root "\"

Set-Location ds:

Get-ChildItem