How to Find the Datastore Name from its UID in PowerShell

Every now and then, as a virtualization engineer, you'll be going through a log entry or be examining a setting and you'll ask yourself, "I wonder where that file is?".  Why might you ask yourself that?  Probably because you're staring at a path that looks something like this: "/vmfs/volumes/5126bbe6-5478b245-773b-04519ad9e307/SacDC1/SacDC1.vmdk" and all of your datastores are named things like this: "sac-LUN1".  Needless to say, correlating the two can be a bit difficult.

Translating LUN Names, just how do we do it?  Really quite simple, there's nothing much to it! (can you tell I have young kids at home?)  The only way that I know of to translate those UIDs to human friendly datastore names is to look at each datastore and see if the UID matches.  While that's an arduous and time consuming task for a human, it's a trivial one for a machine!  So, I put together the following PowerCLI one-liner to track down the datastore:

get-datastore | ? {$_.ExtensionData.info.url -like "*5126bbe6-5478b245-773b-04519ad9e307*"}

This command begins by getting all datastores in the environment, then checks the datastore path for each one.  If that datastore path contains the specified UID, it returns that datastore object.  If you specify only part of the UID and there are multiple matches, it will return them all... so you should probably be more specific ;)

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