POSTS

VMware PowerShell Get-VIHumanReadablePath

August 18, 2010

An example of how to get the human readable path of an object in the VMware SDK. This is using PowerShell and requires that PowerCLI be installed, but should be easily converted to other languages.

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Function Get-VIHumanReadablePath
{
    param
    (
        $target
    )

    try
    {
        if ($target.GetType().BaseType -ne [VMware.Vim.ManagedEntity])
        {
            $target = $target | Get-View -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
        }
    }
    catch
    {
        $target = $null
    }

    if (!$target)
    {
        throw "Get-VIHumanReadablePath: Could not get the Managed Entity representation of -target"
    }

    $path = $target.Name
    while ($target.Parent)
    {
        $target = Get-View $target.Parent
        $path = $target.Name + "/" + $path
    }
    
    $path
  }

Example usage

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Get-VIHumanReadablePath (Get-Folder Linux)
Get-VIHumanReadablePath (Get-VM LinuxTemp01)
Get-VIHumanReadablePath (Get-VM LinuxTemp01 | Get-View)
Get-VIHumanReadablePath (Get-ResourcePool Prod)
Get-VIHumanReadablePath (Get-VM LinuxTemp01 | Get-ResourcePool)
Get-VIHumanReadablePath (Get-VMHost esx001.local)