We recently had to get some lists together for the Licensing department as there are virtualisation deals which can be used to reduce the amount of licensing costs for your VM’s.

Im not sure what they are this week but last time I checked you could license all VM’s on one host with 1 Data center license. I think there are also deals for 3 vm’s per Enterprise license or similar ?

So with the following powershell script we were able to integrate the VI toolkit with WMI information to gain the information needed…

connect-viserver MYVISERVER
$vms = Get-VM | select-object Name, Host

$myCol = @()
foreach ($vm in $vms)
{
$MyDetails = “” | select-Object Host, Name, OS
$MyDetails.Host = $vm.Host
$MyDetails.Name = $vm.Name
$OSDetails = Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem -computername $vm.Name
$MyDetails.OS = $OSDetails.Caption
$myCol += $MyDetails
}
$myCol | sort Host

Sample output:

Host : HOST01.TEST.gov.uk
Name : TEST01
OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

Host : HOST01.TEST.gov.uk
Name : TEST03
OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

Host : HOST02.TEST.gov.uk
Name : TEST02
OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

At the UK Powershell user group James used Netmap, I was intrigued with this and what it could do, with a few lines to integrate this into the VI toolkit I managed to get a nice map of which VM’s were on each host.

Download Netmap here and try it for yourself….

Connect-VIServer yourserver
$vmhs = Get-VM

$myCol = @()
ForEach ($vmh in $vmhs)
{
$myobj = “” | select-Object source, target
$myobj.source = $vmh.host
$myobj.target = $vmh.Name
$myCol += $myobj
}

$mycol | Export-Csv .\Temp.csv
Import-Csv .\Temp.csv | show-netmap

Im also working on a Visio script which will produce a much more pleasing to the eye report…Watch this space and let me know if you would like to test it for me in its early phases.