I had to move a number of clusters into a different Virtual Center and I didn’t want to have to deal with manually moving VMs into their correct folders. In my case I happened to have matching folder structures in both vCenters and I didn’t have to worry about creating an identical folder structure on the target vCenter. All I need to do was to record the current folder location and move the VM to the correct folder in the new vCenter.

I first run this script against the source cluster in the source vCenter. It generates a CSV file with the VM name and the VM folder name

$VMCollection = @()
Connect-VIServer "Source-vCenter
$CLUSTERNAME = "MySourceCluster"
 
$vms = Get-Cluster $CLUSTERNAME | Get-VM
foreach ( $vm in $vms )
{
	$Details = New-Object PSObject
	$Details | Add-Member -Name Name -Value $vm.Name -membertype NoteProperty 
	$Details | Add-Member -Name Folder -Value $vm.Folder -membertype NoteProperty
	$VMCollection += $Details
}
 
$VMCollection
$VMCollection | Export-CSV "folders.csv"

Once the first script is run, I disconnect each host from the old vCenter and add it into a corresponding cluster in the new vCenter. I can now run this command aginst the new vCenter to ensure the VMs go back into their original folders.

Connect-VIServer "Dest-vCenter"
$vmlist = Import-CSV "folders.csv"
 
foreach ( $vm in $vmlist )
{
	$vm.Name
	$vm.Folder
	Move-VM -VM $vm.Name -Destination $vm.Folder
}