PowerShell: Get VMs running on a single host

I wanted to perform an action on all of the VMs on a particular host, but using my connection to Virtual Center instead of reconnecting directly to the host.  I found something interesting.

This is wrong:

Get-VMhost esx1.local | Get-VM #Not what I expected.

This does not work as I expected. It gets all of the VMs in the cluster instead of just the ones registered with the host.  My best guess is that this is because the host is not really a container object when in a cluster.

As a workaround you have to do something like this:

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.Host.Name -eq " esx1.local"}

To cut down on Get-VM processing time do:

Get-VMhost esx1.local | Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.Host.Name -eq "esx1.local"}

The first part of the pipeline still gets all of the VMs in the cluster, but this is better than all of the VMs in Virtual Center.

I thought I had a good solution and then a co-worker showed me a command line that he got from somewhere (sorry, don’t know where) that cut the processing time in half (Measure-Command is great).

(Get-VMhost esx1.local | Get-View).VM | % {$_ | Get-VIObjectByVIView}

Update 3/5/2009 — As Jeremy indicated in the comments, this is a more appropriate way to use Get-VIObjectByVIView:

(Get-VMhost esx1.local | Get-View).VM | Get-VIObjectByVIView