Using VMware PowerCli Part 1

Since VMware 6.0 I have started to use VMware PowerCli module to automate task and checks that I do daily or for large task that would take a long time to do manually. I am going to go through installing PowerCli and some of the useful command and script that can be use to check VMware.

To install PowerCli there are some pre-req’s

• Windows PowerShell 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, or 5.1
• .NET Framework 4.5, 4.5.x, 4.6, or 4.6.x

I would recommend installing the latest version of PowerShell which is currently 5.1

To check current version of PowerShell run $PSVersionTable

To install the latest version install the latest Windows Management Framework 5.1 link to download page is below.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54616

Step 1 is to install PowerCli

The old PowerCli was a PowerShell snap in and required downloading an exe to install, the new version is module based and can be installed directly from the PowerShell console. To install run the below command.

Install-Module VMware.PowerCli

If you need to update the module to a new release run

Update-Module VMWare.PowerCli

If a path is not specified the default location that the module files will be placed in is

C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules

Once the install has finished to verify that PowerCli is installed run the below command

Step 2 is to connect to vCenter

To connect to vCenter open an elevated PowerShell console and import the VMware Module

Import-Module VMware.PowerCli

Connect-VIServer lab-VC vCenterServer

Once connected we can now start to run command against vCenter.

To get host information run

Get-VMHost

To find all VM’s that have snapshots over a certain date. I want to get all snapshots older than 1 day to change this just edit the $date variable.

$date = (Get-Date).AddDays(-1)
$Snapshot = get-vm | get-snapshot
$Snapshot | where {$_.Created -lt $date}

To check datastores you can run

Get-Datastore

To get additional info you can do some math’s and use arrays to get % free space of the datastores. The below will get all datastores that have less than 25% free space.

Get-Datastore | select Name,@{N=”UsedSpaceGB”;E={[math]::Round(($_.CapacityGB),2)}},

@{N=”FreeSpaceGB”;E={[math]::Round(($_.FreeSpaceGB),2)}},

@{N=”%Free”;E={[math]::Round(($_.FreeSpaceGB)/($_.CapacityGB)*100,2)}} |

where %Free -lt “25”