Getting to grips with VMware's PowerCLI

Yesterday I downloaded VMware's PowerCLI installer and started playing with some of the supplied cmdlets. The motivation behind it was to find a simple way of listing all of the current snapshots on our army of VMs. With the best will in the world, we find that the odd snapshot is not removed once we're finished a change and therefore can be in place for weeks before being re-discovered and removed.

The first step in using the PowerCLI cmdlets is to connect to the vCentre or Virtual Centre server and that's done using Connect-VIServer . If the optional arguments are supplied you'll be promped with a login dialog.

Once connected, you then have access to run the cmdlet's that are allowed as per your level of permissions in Virtual Centre. In my case I looked at the Get-Snapshot cmdlet, which accepts a VM name as an argument and returns details of any snapshots associated with the supplied VM name.

Using some basic PowerShell I was able to get a tabular list of all VMs with snapshots, showing the name of the VM, the date that the snapshot was created, the snapshot's name and description. Very handy for quickly finding those forgotten snapshots.

Get-VM * | Get-Snapshot | Select VM, Created, Name, Description

Using PowerShell with VMware looks to make those painful admin tasks easier but there was one 'gotcha' that i noticed. When finished using PowerShell, use the Disconnect-VIServer or your session will stay open on the VC Server.