LoadVMs-FromFile

I was using the VMware VI Toolkit for Windows for a change and I needed to load VMs from a CSV and my typical stream oriented way of doing this was very inefficient over the WAN (or LAN really). There are many ways of making Get-VM operations faster, but for this change I decided to use the standard Get-VM cmdlet with an array of computer names instead of doing them one by one.

Below is the function I wrote to make this easier for repeated use. The csv should have the computer name under a “Name” column heading. All other columns are ignored.

Example file

Field1,Name,Field3,FieldN
"","testvm01","",""
"","testvm02","",""

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function LoadVMs-FromFile {
  param (
    $file = $(throw "A file must be specified.")
  )
  $vmNames = @()
  Import-Csv $file | % {$vmNames += $_.Name}
  Get-VM $vmNames
}