PowerCLI Start and stop VM using get-view
Intro
When trying to stop and start a bunch of servers I noticed that using the normal commands it took a while to shutdown all VM’s mostly because the tasks are started after each other. When You select the bunch of VM’s in vCenter, right click and select shutdown it will almost instantly start the requests tasks.
get-vm | shutdown-vmguest -confirm:$false
Fine-Tuning
I have test set of 5 CentOS Virtual machines which are all named with CENTOS in the name.
Using the measure-command command I measured the time it took to run the commands.
| Command | TotalSeconds |
| measure-command {(get-vm -name centos*)|Start-VM -Confirm:$false -RunAsync}|select totalseconds|ft -a | 3,32 |
| measure-command {(get-vm -name centos*)|Shutdown-VMGuest -Confirm:$false}|select totalseconds|ft -a | 6,18 |
Not too bad you would say using 5 VM’s
But let’s extrapolate this for more machines
| Amount VM | Start(Sec) | Stop(Sec) | Start(Min) | Stop(Min) |
| 1,00 | 0,66 | 1,24 | 0,01 | 0,02 |
| 50,00 | 33,20 | 61,80 | 0,55 | 1,03 |
| 100,00 | 66,40 | 123,60 | 1,11 | 2,06 |
| 500,00 | 332,00 | 618,00 | 5,53 | 10,30 |
| 1000,00 | 664,00 | 1236,00 | 11,07 | 20,60 |
As you can see this is gaining a lot more time.
Now I build 2 commands which do exact the same thing only using the get-view commands.
| measure-command {(Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine -property Name -Filter @{“Name” = “CentOS*”}).ShutdownGuest()} |select totalseconds|ft -a | 2,33 |
| measure-command {(Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine -property Name -Filter @{“Name” = “CentOS*”}).PowerOnVM_Task($null)} |select totalseconds|ft -a | 1,64 |
When we extrapolate this one we see a lot of change
| Aantal VM | Start(Sec) | Stop(Sec) | Start(Min) | Stop(Min) |
| 1,00 | 0,2 | 0,04 | 0,00 | 0,00 |
| 50,00 | 10,00 | 2,00 | 0,17 | 0,03 |
| 100,00 | 20,00 | 4,00 | 0,33 | 0,07 |
| 500,00 | 100,00 | 20,00 | 1,67 | 0,33 |
| 1000,00 | 200,00 | 40,00 | 3,33 | 0,67 |
Conclusion
Starting VM’s from 11 to 3 minutes and stopping from 20,60 minutes to 0,67 minutes. That’s an incredible time win when doing this with a lot of servers.
As you can see if you have a small set of VM’s or time enough (batch jobs) it might be easier to use the common cmdlets. Those will do the actions you want plus it’s more readable for colleague’s who can understand Powershell but using the VI APIs might be a bridge too far.
I haven’t been able to test it in real practice at the moment, so the extrapolation is based on the amount of time it took to power on and shutdown 5 Test VM’s.