VM Inventory PowerCLI script for DR Purposes
I know that there have been a number of blog posts in the past about creating inventories of VMs within an environment, showing various details about the environment… I have even used some of them myself in the past.
The script that I have pulled together and enhanced (from various sources) was designed to provide information that can be used in the event of a disaster and the virtual machines needed to be registered back into the environment from the datastores. There is an additional script that I discovered which allows you to register all VMs on a particular datastore into the environment, and this works quite well (I’ll post this information separately) but sometimes there may be a requirement to just register a few of the VMs and therefore this information could be very useful and reduce the time to recover the VMs.
Unfortunately, I’m not a Powershell or PowerCLI expert and therefore there may be a more efficient way to perform this task, especially as this task can take around 3 hrs to complete on an environment consisting of around 700 VMs, and therefore in my environment, I only run this script once a week. There are two files that are created at the end of the script, a CSV file which will allow you to manipulate the information and a formatted html page. The html page looks similar to below (all references to particular server names have been removed):
This script runs on PowerCLI 6.5 Update 1. Items in bold and italic should be changed for your environment.
Here’s the script:
get-module -ListAvailable VM* | Import-Module
connect-viserver vcenterservername
$Date = get-date -f dd-MM-yyyy
$Header = @"
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<html><head><title>VMware Inventory Report from vcenterservername</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body {
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
#report { width: 835px; }
table{
border-collapse: collapse;
border: none;
font: 10pt Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: black;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
table td{
font-size: 12px;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 20px;
text-align: left;
}
table th {
font-size: 12px;
font-weight: bold;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 20px;
text-align: left;
}
h2{ clear: both; font-size: 130%; }
h3{
clear: both;
font-size: 115%;
margin-left: 20px;
margin-top: 30px;
}
p{ margin-left: 20px; font-size: 12px; }
table.list{ float: left; }
table.list td:nth-child(1){
font-weight: bold;
border-right: 1px grey solid;
text-align: right;
}
table.list td:nth-child(2){ padding-left: 7px; }
table tr:nth-child(even) td:nth-child(even){ background: #A7D6EC; }
table tr:nth-child(odd) td:nth-child(odd){ background: #A7D1E5; }
table tr:nth-child(even) td:nth-child(odd){ background: #7FC6E7; }
table tr:nth-child(odd) td:nth-child(even){ background: #C2E6F6; }
div.column { width: 320px; float: left; }
div.first{ padding-right: 20px; border-right: 1px grey solid; }
div.second{ margin-left: 30px; }
table{ margin-left: 20px; }
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<H1>VMware Inventory Report from vcenterserver</H1>
"@
$Pre = "This report lists all of the VMs as of $Date"
$Post = "Created on: $Date by yourname"
$inventory = Get-VM | Add-Member -MemberType ScriptProperty -Name 'VMXPath' -Value {$this.extensiondata.config.files.vmpathname} -Passthru -Force | Select Name, @{N="Cluster";E={Get-Cluster -VM $_}}, `
@{N="ESX Host";E={Get-VMHost -VM $_}}, `
@{N="Datastore";E={Get-Datastore -VM $_}},PowerState,NumCPU,MemoryMB,Folder,VMXPath,Notes | Sort -Property Name
$inventory | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation filelocation\VMInventory.csv
$inventory | ConvertTo-Html -title "VMware Inventory Report from vcenterservername" -Head $Header -PreContent $Pre -PostContent $Post | Out-file filelocation\VMInventory.html
Disconnect-viserver -confirm:$false