Find Host from VM

[BostonTechGuy]

Seems I have several lost sheep.

Is there a way with PowerCLI (or any other way) to get host information from a VM? 

I found out my client has several independent VM Hosts not in vCenter.  They also have networked "production in use" servers on Workstation and old VM Server.  I need to find those hosts.  In a company of this size, it would be the best approach to pull from VM (if possible) to find the host.

Thanks,

Boston TechGuy

[weinstein5]

I do not believe it is possible to pull that information from the VM -

[LucD]

First question, how do you find those VM ?

Is there a list of stations that are VM ?

weinstein5 is right, you can only get information from a VM with PowerCLI, once you are connected to a vSphere server.

And that can be a vCenter or an ESX(i) server, as is documented in the PowerCLI Release Notes.

You could try, provided you have access to the VM's files, to import them into a vCenter.

Or as an alternative you could envisage a V2V.

[BostonTechGuy]

How did we find them:

Server audit reports. Several different network scanners and monitoring tools found the servers.  Seems one-off VM Hosts, and VMware Workstation & Server on Desktop are an issue at my client's locations.  I dont have control nor view into those hosts.  So we can find the VMs and by IP Address narrow down the building.  After that it becomes difficult to locate.  Network team is currently working on tracking the network data of the servers, see what ports they are hitting on different switches.  I know through third party software like Microsoft SCCM and Solar Winds Orion you can audit the software installed on the Windows Desktops.. if you pay for the license.. which my client is not currently in a position to do this year.

V2V is a good idea, then turn off the original.  The Business Owner in the company needs to sign off on that.  Plus many of the developers that built these one off systems dont want to come forward.  Fun with Politics.

From a security reason I understand that you wouldn't want to reverse track a VM to its host. But I wonder if there is some way either through PowerCLI or on a Windows Machine the registry to get that info...

Thanks,

Boston Tech Guy

[LucD]

Not that I know of.

The network & MAC address approach is the best way to go imho.

Get the MAC address, and the network team should be able to determine on which switch port that MAC address is coming on the network.

From there it will depend how good their cabling is documented I'm afraid :smileygrin:

[BostonTechGuy]

Agreed.  I will leave it to the network team.

As for the cabling... not my problem

[LucD]

Luckily they are color coded :smileymischief:

[michaelbrux]

If you think your hosts are old GSX or VMware Server hosted on Windows you can use PowerShell to see what programs are installed on each server.

Use PowerShell to Quickly Find Installed Software - Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog - Site Home - TechNet ...

If you think the hosts are esx or esxi then they should have web services running (I forget the actually name but its the web page on a host were you can download the vsphere client.  Simply open a browser and type in http://your-ip-address  If it is esx or esxi the web page will come up. 

You can probably find a vb script where you can pipe in the ip address and attempt to open a web page.