I second what Duncan Epping said about Alan Renouf and his vCheck 3 script. In fact, I was in the middle of writing a very similar post when I saw his. I won’t duplicate what Duncan said, but I will say:

1. If you haven’t started using PowerCLI to help manage your infrastructure you might want to check it out. I started using it when I was doing mass Storage VMotions and got sick of doing it all through the vSphere client. Turns out, in PowerCLI, it’s:

Get-Datastore “source-datastore” | Get-VM | Move-VM -datastore (Get-Datastore “target-datastore”)

…and then you wait for it to finish. That’s really slick.

2. I don’t pick up a new tool on a whim. I always need a concrete reason or a specific goal, like wanting a better way to do whole-datastore Storage VMotions. Mr. Renouf’s vCheck 3 script is an excellent concrete reason to start, though. It’ll send you this nice email with lists of potential problems in your environment, plus it’s a great example of how to do things in PowerCLI if you want to get into writing your own stuff.

3. If you do run the vCheck 3 script and get a permission error you may need to edit the properties of the file itself and unblock it. For example:

Thanks Virtu-Al!

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