Virtually Jason

One of my customers recently migrated a bunch of VMs between two vCenter servers .  When they finished, they realized that none of their VMs' custom attributes followed the VMs into the new vCenter environment; apparently those attributes are owned by the vCenter server, rather than stored in the VMX file.  Fortunately, they had an export of their VM inventory that included those custom fields, but they had no idea how to repopulate that data across their horde of VMs. You can see where this is going... and, as expected, I helped them put together a quick PowerCLI script that would set things straight.  This script takes 2 parameters as input: a CSV file that contains the data from the VM inventory (including each VM Name and columns for each of the custom attributes), and an array of which custom attributes need to be set (since that inventory export file is probably going to contain a lot of columns that aren't custom attributes). Once it's executed, the script goe...

9/15/2016 Update:  I've updated these scripts with some new functionality.  I just posted a description of the new functionality as well as how to use the scripts in the context of a vCenter Upgrade . A couple years ago, I made a blog post about a process that I use to migrate from one vCenter to another , and then I later created some scripts  to facilitate that process.  Those scripts worked fine for me, but others have found some weaknesses.  Namely, they don't work if there are multiple folders in the inventory with the same name (such as VM\Project1\Production and VM\Project2\Production, where there are two folders named Production).  Also, I never thought about VMs in vApps, which don't technically have a parent folder. So, I've been working on updated scripts.  I'm a little hesitant to post these, as I haven't actually used them to perform a migration yet, but there seems to be a lot of people who need them.  I've put together two scrip...

1/26/2016 Update:  We've learned that this script doesn't elegantly handle the situation where multiple VM folders have the same name (but different parent folders).  I've put together a basic script that should help recover from that (in the comments), but I haven't had a chance to thoroughly test it.  That script is built to move all VMs from the "Discovered Virtual Machine" Folder back into their correct locations.  I'm working on an updated pair of scripts that will handle this whole situation better. 2/9/2016 Update:  I've published an updated version of the vCenter Migration Scripts  - check it out instead of these! One of my customers wanted to export their VM Folder structure and the associated permissions from one vCenter to another, in preparation for a vCenter forklift.  Once the destination vCenter was fully prepared, the goal would be to migrate ESXi hosts with VMs into the new vCenter, then move the VMs into the appropriate folders....