Virtual Instance Discovery and Analysis

As an Infrastructure Engineer or Architect you need to have a good grasp on what systems comprise your environment. In the past this was somewhat straight forward. You kept a configuration item database in your CMDB and teams had their workbooks and playbooks. However in this new world of DevOps and CI-CD and their automation tool sets such as Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Bladelogic, and many others; developers can stand up their own virtual instances and tare them down. This can make it hard to have a complete picture of your environment. This can be especially difficult for storage infrastructure since many virtual instances can be deployed on large data stores and when there is an IO performance problem tracking down the related hardware can be like following the rabbit to wonderland.

I ran into this while leading several projects for storage infrastructure servicing an ESX environment and developed a powercli script to pull the necessary virtual instance and data-store data from the VSphere systems. First you will need to install powercli for VMware which can be found here:
https://developer.vmware.com/web/tool/12.4/vmware-powercli