I was on a conference call today where someone asked if the server administration team could quickly get a “read” on the VMware Tools version across the server farm. An ESXi upgrade was being deployed and the team wanted a quick way to see what VMs needed to catch up with the deployment.
Fortunately, I had a bunch of PowerShell snippets lying about that would fit the bill nicely. Of course, there are a few different ways to accomplish this, depending upon which resources that you are permitted to access; but using PowerShell in a loop with a list of your server names is a quick and easy way to get it done.
So first, a little set up… Imagine that we are inside a PowerShell script, in a foreach loop (or a function called by that loop) that is calling each computer (our Windows 2008 R2 servers) in a list. At the time you hit this snippet of code, the current server name in the loop is in the variable $ComputerName, and the output file for the report is $outfile.
write "" | Out-File $outfile -append
$vmtoolstatus = Get-WmiObject -class Win32_Product -computername $ComputerName | Where-Object {$_.Name -match "VMWare Tools"} |select Name,version
if ("X$vmtoolstatus" -eq "X")
{
write "VMware Tools **NOT** found." | Out-File $outfile -append
}
else
{
write "WMware tools presence/version info:" | Out-File $outfile -append
$vmtoolstatus | Out-File $outfile -append
}
All we’re really doing here is to query the product list for the tools, and if present report the version. And the result look something like this for each item in the loop:
WMware tools presence/version info: Name version ---- ------- VMware Tools 8.3.2.1593
Simple, but effective and functional.
I hope it helps!
Tags: foreach, Get-WmiObject, loop, Powershell, VMware, VMWare Tools, Win32_Product, Windows Server 2008 R2
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