PowerCLI - Finding Virtual Machine via VM IP

Question

I am trying to locate specific VM's based from IP addresses in PowerCLI. I found this script online Grabbing VM ipaddress via PowerCLI

The intial question explaines the issues I was having, and the answer looks to resolve such issues, however when I run such script:

Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | Select @{N='IP';E={[string]::Join(',',$_.Guest.net.IPAddress)}}

All I get is the following output:

IP
--

And that's it... Am I missing input such as specifying a cluster or DC, does this work for anyone else?

Solution 1

Although I'm not sure why the above still doesn't work, i found the following that may help people. Very useful for Large VM enviroments. (This is what I was trying to script from the above initially).

Using PowerCLI to Find a Specific Guest IP

Solution 2

Get-View

As KERR pointed out, the code in bxm's answer is faster than the code in my alternative solution below. [It was, consistently, 4 times faster for me instead of 10 times faster as KERR claims; but still faster.]

But note tho that for the view objects returned by Get-View, the Guest.IPAddress property consists of a single address and it may not even be an address for a NIC (it may be, e.g. a VPN connection).

Here's a one-line (tweaked) version of bxm's code:

Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | ?{ $_.Guest.IPAddress -eq "1.2.3.4" }

and here's a version that should check all of the NIC addresses:

Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | ?{ ($_.Guest.Net | %{ $_.IpAddress }) -contains "1.2.3.4" }

where "1.2.3.4" is the IP address for which you want to find the corresponding VM.

Note that my version is slightly different than bxm's. bxm's version effectively ensures that any matching VMs only have the specified IP address assigned and no others (or, rather, it would if the Guest.IPAddress property was an array). My version only ensures that the VM has that specified address, regardless of any other IP addresses it's assigned.

Get-VM

Here's my adaptation of the code at the link provided by StackUser_py's answer:

Get-VM | Where-Object -FilterScript { $_.Guest.Nics.IPAddress -contains "1.2.3.4" }

Note tho that these two solutions return different results, the first an (array of) VirtualMachine (objects), and the second a UniversalVirtualMachineImpl. However, calling Get-VM and passing it the name of the VM returned by the first solution does not significantly alter the duration.

Solution 3

I got the command working with a small tweak to the objects used, like so:

$list = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | Select name,@{N='IP';E={[string]::Join(',',$_.Guest.ipaddress)}}
$list | ?{ $_.ip -eq "1.2.3.4" }

Comments

[Kenny Evitt]

@KERR Thanks for your help! Please delete your comments here (as they're no longer relevant to the answer as it is now).

[KERR]

You can also use this as a one-liner by separating the commands with a semicolon eg. $list = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | Select name,@{N='IP';E={[string]::Join(',',$_.Guest.ipaddress)}} ; $list | ?{ $_.ip -eq "1.2.3.4" }

[KERR]

The plot thickens - while the Get-View method is faster, it only returns (searches) the first IP address of the VM. The Get-VM method works on VMs with multiple IPs.

[Kenny Evitt]

@KERR The IP address via Get-View for one of my VMs was for a VPN, not even one of the two NICs! Get-VM only returned the addresses for the two NICs. I can't find the VPN IP address, or any other info for the relevant network connection, anywhere else in the view object for that VM.

[Kenny Evitt]

$_.Guest.ipaddress is a (single) string and not an array so the 'string join' expression is unnecessary.

[Kenny Evitt]

This won't necessarily work for VMs with multiple NICs.

[KERR]

FYI this method will only list and query the first IP of the VM.