Get VMtools with PowerCLI 5.5 R2

VMtools is one of those nagging little pieces of software that always seems to be a pain to update.  Back in my System Administration days, I commonly needed to report on which VMs had different versions of VMtools, and I have to admit, this was a more difficult property to find from my PowerCLI toolkit.

Take a look at the old way of finding my VMtools versions through PowerCLI.

[code language=powershell]
get-view -viewtype virtualmachine | select Name, @{ Name=ToolsVersion”; Expression={$_.config.tools.toolsversion}} | FT -autosize
[/code]

Whew!  That’s a pretty intricate command just to find the VMtools version, if I do say so.

So, when I saw that PowerCLI 5.5 R2 was released and had a new vmguest property for VMtools I wanted to give a big shout out to Alan Renouf and the PowerCLI team over at VMware.  This was a long time coming.

Check out the new property that is available in vmguest.

Now, we can run the command below to find our VMtools version, and this one is MUCH easier to remember.

[code language=powershell]
get-vm | get-vmguest | select VMName, ToolsVersion | FT -autosize
[/code]

If you haven’t upgraded to PowerCLI 5.5 R2 you can grab the download here, and be sure to get Alan Renouf a shout for his team’s work on the new code.