How to get the Operating System (OS) of Virtual machines with PowerCLI

There have been numerous occasions where we were required to gather the list of VMs in the vCenter along with their OS, for audits, for support, to plan patching, etc… But its not always that easy.

The vCenter gets the OS details of the VM with the aid of VM Tools in the virtual machine. But what if the VM is powered off or doesn’t have tools installed? Then the OS is left as blank! But there is a workaround, we can fetch the OS info the VM was configured with – since that information is stored in the vCenter itself, we don’t have to rely on the VM tools running inside the VM to get this information.

This is in the $_.ExtensionData.Config.GuestFullName parameter in Get-VM

One Liner to get the list of all VMs and OS info in the vCenter

Get-VM | Select @{Label = "VM Name" ; Expression = {$_.Name} },@{Label = "Guest OS" ; Expression = {$_.ExtensionData.Config.GuestFullName} }| Export-CSV "vm_os_info.csv"

Its as simple as that. You will get a csv with two columns as “VM Name” and “Guest OS” with all the information in the vCenter wrapped in a neat little bow.

Hope this short and sweet post was useful to you!

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And as always, Happy scripting!