Today I had an entire datastore of VMs to register, probably about 30 in total, and I didn’t want to go through the GUI and register each VM manually.
I came up with this quick unix one-liner:
# NOTE: My datastore path is /vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73
# replace this with whatever datastore needs searching
#VMs
find /vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73 -name "*.vmx" -exec vim-cmd solo/registervm {} \;
#Templates
find /vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73 -name "*.vtmx" -exec vim-cmd solo/registervm {} \;
Which gave me this:
/vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73 # find /vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73 -name "*.vmx" -exec vim-cmd solo/registervm {} \;
143
144
...
...
...
148
149
/vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73 #
There are more elegant ways to do this in PowerCLI that are probably more scaleable (not registering everything on one host, for example) but this is a quick, down and dirty way to get the job done!
