VMware PowerCLI Scripts – Get ParentVM used on Pools

In the last days I needed to get a quick view of which templates we’re using on enviroments. Because we have linked clones, our pools have configured a ParentVM and the respective Snapshot.

If you have a large environment after a while you may miss a little bit control of which templates/parent vms are really being used, which ones were just for testing purposes and you don’t need them anymore, etc.

So, for a quick look at your environment and to understand which parent vms each pool is using just follow these steps:

• First you’ll need to open View PowerCLI on the correspondent Connection Server
• Then, run the following command:
  Get-Pool
• As simple as that, you’ll get all info from each pool
• If you want something like that but, with less information use the followin command:
  Get-Pool | Select pool_id, displayName, enabled, vcServerName, parentVMPath, parentVMSnapshotPath
• Like in any powershell script or command, you can always export the results to a csv file to work it up later:
  Get-Pool | Select pool_id, displayName, enabled, vcServerName, parentVMPath, parentVMSnapshotPath | export-csv D:\export.csv

And…it’s done! :)