I recently had to create a new vDS to replicate a standard vSwitch from another vCenter install. I wanted to create my vDS Distribute Port Groups (DPG) simply, but consistently. As I have a low number of DPGs to create, I could probably have done this manually, but scripting the creation ensures consistency. Plus, it’s a subset of PowerCLI that I wanted to familiarize myself with.

First, I created a vDS and a reference DPG through the vSphere Web Client. You can do this with PowerCLI, but you have to go down the rabbit hole of Views to touch some of the advanced settings, something that’s not well documented and would have been very time consuming for me to explore. I also didn’t mind creating the initial vDS and DPG as the visual view of the Web Client made it easy for me to verify the settings whereas a long string of PowerShell (PoSH) would have been a little more difficult to interpret.

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As part of a migration from one vCenter to another, I wanted to recreate the same VMs and Templates look which meant recreating the folders. This is VERY slow in the vSphere Web Client and only slightly less tedious in the C# client, so I thought I’d use PowerCLI to do the trick. Here is the folder structure I wished to recreate:

Location
-Development
-Pending DeComm
-Production
  -Active Directory Domain Controllers
  -Linux Servers
  -RDP Servers
-Templates
  -Template VMs

PowerCLI has a cmdlet called New-Folder. Unfortunately, it only creates folders of the Hosts and Clusters type. To create a new VMs and Templates folder, we have to use the Get-View cmdlet. By viewing a datacenter or folder and filtering on the proper location, we can call methods to create a folder with the right context:

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I’ve seen a number of articles offering PowerCLI one-liners to find all VMs with connected optical drives, or set to use a datastore, or a number of other possibilities, and mark the drives as disconnected. This is helpful, but may still cause a problem with vMotions if the optical drive is pointing to a non-shared datastore ISO. vMotion does not care if the optical drive is connected, but it does care that it’s pointing to a datastore that not all hosts can see. This one-liner will find all VMs with an ISOPath set for the optical drive and reset it to Client.

Get-VM | Get-CDDrive | Where {$_.ISOPath -ne $null} | Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$false

This looks for all CDDrive objects where the ISOPath value is not null and calls Set-CDDrive with the flag -NoMedia. This should take care of all the VMs where someone has set it to use an ISO on the datastore. It will NOT fix the mapping for VMs connected to the Host Device or Client Device – however, those are more rare and do not usually stand between you and a vMotion. On those rare instances, you may still need to manually dismount the optical drive on the VM or use a PowerCLI one-liner targeting those settings.