PowerCLI – Script for Time and VMTools

One of my clients I love spending time with have a constant battle to keep VMware Tools (VMTools) up-to-date and keeping the VMs time in sync. I sadly, don’t get to spend as much time with them as I would like but this week and next week I’m onsite and wanted to see how I can help them out.

Though there are some great blog posts about setting the advanced features of VMware Tools within a VM but I wanted to audit what was currently set:

…and created the following two PowerCLI one liners to give me that output to review:

The first gets a list of VMs that have their VMware Tools setting to upgrade on power cycle, and is equivalent to the GUI tick box “Check and Upgrade Tools during power cycling”

Get-View -ViewType virtualmachine | Select name,@{N='ToolsConfigInfo';E={$_.Config.Tools.syncTimeWithHost } } | Export-Csv "c:\temp\VMToolsStatus.csv" -NoTypeInformation

The second audit, gives a list of VMs that are syncing its time with the host and is equivalent to the GUI tick box “Synchronize guest time with the host“. Though it would be best practice to have the VM get its time from a NTP source (Ideally the same as the host), in some cases this isn’t possible due to OS restrictions, and therefore this is a good choice.

Get-View -ViewType virtualmachine | select name,@{N='ToolsUpgradePolicy';E={$_.Config.Tools.ToolsUpgradePolicy } } | Export-Csv "c:\temp\TimeSyncStatus.csv" -NoTypeInformation

These two one liner were based on the setting commands available to automatically upgrade VMware Tools on the VMware KB 1010048.

So the code from the KB article can be used to set the automatic upgrading of the VMware Tools on power cycle:

Foreach ($v in (get-vm)) {
$vm = $v | Get-View
$vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$vmConfigSpec.Tools = New-Object VMware.Vim.ToolsConfigInfo
$vmConfigSpec.Tools.ToolsUpgradePolicy = "UpgradeAtPowerCycle"
$vm.ReconfigVM($vmConfigSpec)
}

…and with some minor alterations can be used to set the time syncing option:

Foreach ($v in (get-vm)) {
$vm = $v | Get-View
$vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$vmConfigSpec.Tools = New-Object VMware.Vim.ToolsConfigInfo
$vmConfigSpec.Tools.syncTimeWithHost = $true
$vm.ReconfigVM($vmConfigSpec)
}

Be warned this will set the option on all VMs within your vCenter. If you want to only do a number of VMs either do manually or alter the script