Searching for a VM

One of the problems that most people have with virtualizing vCenter is that they don’t know where the vCenter VM is when there are problems.

There’s a fairly easy way to counter this problem.

WIth a couple of PowerShell lines you can check all ESX hosts individual for the existance of the vCenter VM, in this case the S-VC.

One of the minor issues is that you have to logon to each server. With some more lines of code you can even circumvent that.

Here’s the code:

$searchservers = @('host1','host2','host3')
 
$SearchVM=’S-VC’
 
foreach ($vmhost in $searchservers) { 
    connect-viserver $vmhost > out-null if (
        get-vm | where {$\_.Name -eq $SearchVM}
      ) { 
          write-host $SearchVM " found on host " $vmhost 
        } 
}

For this to work you need access to your ESX hosts from the network with the computer that’s running the script. You also need the VI Toolkit.