If you’re a vSphere admin, you’ll be very familiar with the esxcli command. But have you ever wondered how to run esxcli commands from PowerCLI? Maybe you don’t want to enable SSH on your hosts, or perhaps you need to run an esxcli command in a PowerShell script.

At the time of writing the New-HardDisk PowerCLI CmdLet does not yet have a -RunAsync parameter. I found this out when trying to create a new 300 GiB eagerly zeroed disk on multiple VMs in one go. I soon realised that I was going to be sat there for a long time as each new disk was being formatted one at a time.

I recently had to provide our networking team with a list of ESXi hosts and which switchports each of their physical NICs were connected to. Like many other environments, we are primarily a Cisco house and therefore I was able to get this data by querying the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) information via PowerCLI. Here is how I went about it.

Introduction With Storage DRS (SDRS) enabled datastore clusters, we have many options to configure overrides on a per-VM basis. For example disabling SDRS for a specific VM or forcing SDRS to keep a VMs VMDK files on separate datastores (anti-affinity). However, one thing which has caught out our 2nd line team recently and caused us some SDRS performance issues is that when you manually Storage vMotion (svMotion) one or more VMDK files and pick a specific datastore as the destination, you have to tick a box that disables SDRS for the particular VM.

For your reference here is a list of the articles in this mini-series. vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 1: Generating Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 2: Downloading Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 3: A Helper Module (this article) Introduction If you have been following along with the previous two articles in this series, you should now have a pretty good understanding of how to manipulate the extensionData container via PowerCLI to generate and download reports from vRealize Operations Manager (vROps).

Introduction A colleague of mine recently asked for some help with a script he was writing. We use vSphere tags in order to determine which backup schedule a given VM is in and he wanted to find all VMs which were not assigned a tag in the category backup-service-level, and therefore were not being backed up. His actual query was regarding filtering out certain VMs which will never be given a backup tag.

For your reference, here are the articles in this mini-series: vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 1: Generating Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 2: Downloading Reports (this article) vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 3: A Helper Module Introduction Following on from the previous article in this mini-series, this article demonstrates how to retrieve a generated report from vROps as a PowerShell object. Downloading A Generated Report The last step of the previous article was to use the GetReport() method to verify that your report generation was complete.

For your reference, here are the articles in this mini-series: vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 1: Generating Reports (this article) vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 2: Downloading Reports vROps Reports and PowerCLI Part 3: A Helper Module Introduction I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) lately, mostly running reports. While this is easy enough to do via the web UI, I found myself running a report, downloading the .