PowerCLI – Get HA Restart Priority and Memory Overhead for VMs

 

Another day, another PowerCLI automation script. Here is a handy cmdlet that will fetch you a list of VMs in your environment based on whether they are currently powered on.

 

The interesting bit of info retrieved is their current HA Restart Priority. This will be returned whether the VM itself has its own HA Restart Priority defined, or if the VM is getting this setting from the cluster it is running in. Another interesting bit of info we fetch is the VMs current Memory Overhead figure. Additionally, we also fetch some other useful information such as which Host the VM runs on and the RAM & vCPU assignments for the VM, sorting the whole list by the name of each VM. Remember that the Memory Overhead that is reported back is what the current overhead for the VM is. This can change and there is quite a bit involved in how it is worked out. Further reading on Memory Overhead for VMs can be done here. Read Table 3-2 on page 30 of the linked PDF for the specifics.

 

(Get-VM | Where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"}) | Select Name,PowerState,NumCpu,MemoryMB,VMHost,@{N="MemoryOverhead";E={$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.MemoryOverhead/1MB}}, HARestartPriority | Sort Name | ft

 

If you don’t want a result formatted in a table, just remove the “| ft” at the end of the cmdlet, and remember if you want to push the results of this into a CSV file, you can also just replace the “ft” with a “Export-CSV C:\yourfile.csv”. If you have any improvements to the above script, suggestions or comments, please add do add them!