I have a project to document all of our servers - physical, blade chassis, and virtual - I am attempting to use the VMware vSphere PowerCLI to gather information on our VMWare infrastructure.

However, I cannot see a way to discover the VI servers - there is a cmdlet "Connect-VIServer" - but you need to know which server to connect to.

I don't know what VI servers we have, and cannot rely on having an up to date list of them - I need to create that list.

Is there a way to discover the VI servers?

Thanks

Karl

Karl,

1. Yes, I use it, and wrote the book on it.
2. All the PowerCLI geeks hang out on the Windows Toolkit forum on vmware.com. I happen to be in both, but you will get a more focused group over there. (And I refer people there to come here for general PS stuff...)
3. You have to start somewhere...Do you use vCenter? If so, that would be your point-of-entry. Use Connect-VIServer , and then simply use Get-VMHost to return the host servers, and Get-VM to return the VMs themselves.

If you don't use vCenter, then I would seriously investigate doing so for several reasons, not the least of which is that this is just the sort of thing for which it was made.

HTH

I don't know if we use vCenter - my VI guy os out till mid month and my deadline for the server inventory project is end of month, so I am trying to get a jump on it.

I will check in at the Windows Toolkit forum on vmware.com

Karl

You could do some sort of network scan and look for certain open ports. Grab NMAP and play around with it first by scanning one box and see what ports are open and then use that as your template to look at a whole subnet.

Hal;

I could do that, except that I only care about certain vmware servers (Ones my group is responsible for)

Like a typical user, I didn't mention that part of my requirements :)

I was hoping you'd pop back to my original post with a "Get-ViServer test*" or something like that :)

I found out I can connect to my VIC, and it will report on all 438 servers on our 28 hosts :)

yeah connecting to the vCenter host or ip and then using

get-vmhost

will return all ESX host servers

get-inventory > all-inv.txt

will dump all info on all esx hosts, vms into a txt file


if you know names of some of the VMs you specifically want info on

try pointing browser to that esx host and get the VI Client for windows.

ooh and the ports required from client to vCenter are 80, 443, 902, 903