T E C H N I C A L W H I T E P A P E R / 7 2
VMware vSphere 5.0 Evaluation Guide –
Volume One
To retrieve a list of virtual machines attached to the connected vCenter server, type
Get-VM
. This will return the
Name, PowerState, Num CPUs and Memory (MB). These are all called properties of the virtual machine. vSphere
PowerCLI returns more information than what is shown on the screen. It actually returns an object to this
vSphere PowerCLI session containing more information about the virtual machine.
Figure 94.
To find out more information about the object being returned by vSphere PowerCLI, use the
Get-Member
cmdlet to retrieve a list of all properties, and also methods attached to this virtual machine object.
To do this we will take the
Get-VM
cmdlet and “pipe” it through the
Get-Member
cmdlet. This will take the
results of the
Get-VM
cmdlet and push them as an input into the
Get-Member
cmdlet.
Type
Get-VM | Get-Member
As you can see from the preceding screenshot, the virtual machine object contains more properties than were
shown from our initial
Get-VM
results.