Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

One of the guys in IT manages a lot of Virtual Server instances, like dozens, adding up into many dozens of Virtual Machines all supporting our many devs. He wanted to get some status information with PowerShell. Here's what I came up with.

We used WMI Explorer to check out the WMI namespace installed by Virtual Server (root/vm/virtualserver).

Given a CSV file like this full of (at least) Virtual Server ComputerName

computername,owner,whatever
MSVS1,fred,somedata
MSVS2,joe,somedata
MSVS3,luigi,somedata

We did this:

import-csv servers.csv | foreach-object
{  $_.computername   } |
foreach-object
{ Get-WmiObject -computername $_ -namespace "root/vm/virtualserver" -class VirtualMachine } |
select 
@{Expression={"__SERVER"}; Name="Server"},
Name, CpuUtilization,
select @{Expression={"Uptime/60"}; Name="Uptime(min)"},
PhysicalMemoryAllocated,
DiskSpaceUsed |
format-table -groupby Server -property name,CpuUtilization,Uptime,PhysicalMemoryAllocated,DiskSpaceUsed

Which gives us more or less this:

Which can also reformat, make smaller and run in a loop to get a "top" equivalent for all our VMs. We can catch machines that are running out of space, working too hard, and do capacity planning.

Note, I originally wanted to do this:

import-csv servers.csv | Get-WmiObject -namespace "root/vm/virtualserver" -class VirtualMachine

and have "computername" automatically bound to because the name was the same in the CSV file and the powershell parameter name. This does work in this instance...make a CSV file like this named pids.csv:

ID
1
2
3
4
5

and execute this PowerShell pipeline

import-csv pids.csv | get-process

and you'll get

Get-Process : No process with process ID 1 was found.
At line:1 char:33
+ import-csv pids.csv | get-process <<<<
Get-Process : No process with process ID 2 was found.
At line:1 char:33
+ import-csv pids.csv | get-process <<<<
Get-Process : No process with process ID 3 was found.
At line:1 char:33
+ import-csv pids.csv | get-process <<<<

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     -- -----------
   2399       0        0         32     2   507.75      4 System
Get-Process : No process with process ID 5 was found.
At line:1 char:33
+ import-csv pids.csv | get-process <<<<

See how it called get-process for each ID and it automatically bound the ID column of the table coming from the CSV to the ID property? I wanted to do the same with with computername, but it didn't work.

Get-WmiObject : The input object cannot be bound to any parameters for the comm
and either because the command does not take pipeline input or the input and it
s properties do not match any of the parameters that take pipeline input.
At line:1 char:21

I got this error which I assume means that Get-WMIObject doesn't take pipeline input in the build of PowerShell I have (RC1). I hope this is queued to get fixed ASAP or I'm just missing something.

UPDATE: A "help get-wmiobject" (duh, RTFM) confirms that -computername doesn't take pipeline input.

    -ComputerName <System.String[]>
        Declares on which computer(s) the WMI object may be found

        Parameter required?           false
        Parameter position?           named
        Parameter type                System.String[]
        Default value                 localhost
        Accept multiple values?       true
        Accepts pipeline input?       false
        Accepts wildcard characters?  false

Bummer.