Tag Archives: update

Mass update VM description field

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I had a need to update description fields in many of my VMs and the vSphere client doesn’t exactly lend itself to being able to accomplish this quickly. I decided to use PowerCLI to dump a CSV of my VM names and description fields. I then updated the CSV and imported the new descriptions back into the VMs

First, to dump a CSV of VMs and descriptions in a particular cluster

Connect-VIServer "myserver.foo.com"
Get-Cluster "mycluster" | Get-VM | Select-object Name, Description | Export-CSV "myvms.csv"

Then, after updating the CSV with new description information, save the descriptions back into the VMs.

Connect-VIServer "myserver.foo.com"
$csv=Import-Csv "myvms.csv"
$csv | % { Set-VM $_.VMName -Description $_.Description -Confirm:$false }

vSphere Datastore Last Updated timestamp – Take 2

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I referenced this in an earlier post, but we continue to have datastore alarm problems on hosts running 4.0U2 connected to a 4.1 vCenter. In some cases, the timestamp on the datastore does not update, so it’s not just the alarm having a problem but also the datastore timestamp. As a stopgap measure, we scheduled a little PowerCLI script to automatically run to ensure all of the datastores are refreshed. We then accelerated our upgrade plans to quickly eliminate the problem from our primary datacenter. We now only have it in our DR site, so it’s not critical anymore, just annoying.

if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name VMware.VimAutomation.Core -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
    Add-PsSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core
}
 
Connect-VIServer yourserver.foo.com
$ds = Get-Datastore
foreach ( $dst in $ds )
{
   $dsv = $dst | Get-View
   Write-Host "Refreshing "$dsv.Name   
   $dsv.RefreshDatastore()
}