Notes of a scripter

PowerCLI to find all VMs with thick provisioned VMDK

In my environment at work we have a policy that we thin provision all new VMs. We had an issue with a datastore that was running out of space, so I starting looking into it and found that several of the VMs on this datastore were set with thick provisioning on the hard drives.

Get-Datastore | Get-VM | Get-HardDisk | Where {$_.storageformat -eq "Thick" } | Select Parent, Name, CapacityGB, storageformat | FT -AutoSize

This outputs a list of VMs with the storageformat that is set to thick. This enables us to use this list to be able to get a maintenance window to fix these systems.

PowerCLI to find all VMs with thick provisioned VMDK

The biggest problem with this route is having to keep a close eye on the free space on the datastores, as you can easily fill one up without thinking.

-Stuart

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