A friend of mine had a challenge, identify which VM
belongs to which owner !!!
The reason for that is simple. Since here is a service
provider ,being able to identify it’s customer’s VMs help them to better manage
the environments and specific customer’s needs.
Someone could argue why not to use folders ?!? well,
folders would help you to identify just one aspect of the VM, what if you need to
identify every web server belongs to client A ? well why not create subfolders
? Do you see where I’m going to ?
handling hundreads of folders is not ideally.
vCenter 5.1 brough the ability to Tag it’s inventory,
meaning you can tag one or more vCenter objects with one or more tags. Then you
could easily search them using those tags as well.
Without further
ado, let’s see how we accomplished that:
- Go to vCenter,
click at HOME, Tags and then at New
Category
that will
identify the purpose of our tags
- Give it a
Name and a Description.
Since it’s
intented just for VMs I’m selecting just it. (you could make your tag available for
many objects types).
- Click on New Tag to create the tag itself
- Give it a
Name, a Description and pick up the Category we just created before.
Create a tag
for each Customer you want to identify
Now the funny
part.
Since you might
have hundreds of VMs to Tag, tagging them manually is a hell of a job, so why
not use a script for that ?!?
I’m using
PowerCLI to manage this task, if you need some information to get it started
check the PowerCLI basics here.
- Create a CSV
file including the Name of the VM and the Tag you want to assign to them.
You can export
the VMs from vCenter running: Get-VM | select Name | Export-CSV c:\temp\vms.csv
–NoTypeInformation
Be aware of the
first line, which identifies the headers, you will need them later.
- Copy the CSV
to a location where you can access (I used c:\temp)
Now let’s Tag
those VMs
- On PowerCLI
run: Import-CSV c:\temp\vms.csv | % {New-TagAssignment -Tag $_.Customer -Entity $_.Entity}
It’s done.
To see which VM
has been tagged run: Get-TagAssignment
You can also
filter based on a specific Customer: Get-VM -Tag “Customer” | select Name
Be aware I’m
not the best script guy out there, there might be smatter ways of doing that,
use your imagination ; )
The script is
provided as is, without any guarantee, make sure you run it on a non-productive
environment first to make sure it’s safe.
To learn more about PowerCLI Tag snap-in, click here.
