Have you ever needed a quick way to discover any and all virtual machines in your environment that have a mounted ISO? An example of this would be you are going to be performing an ESXi or VXRail upgrade and need the ability to migrate VMs from one host to another as part of maintenance mode. Below I will walk you through creating a metric to identify VM’s with a mounted ISO and how to turn that metric into a report that can be run.
How to Create the Metric
Go to Dashboards > Views > New View
Provide the View a name and description to help find in the future.
Select list under Presentation
Under subject select vCenter Adapter > Virtual Machine
Change Metrics to Properties
Navigate to Summary > Guest Operating System > Guest OS Full Name
Then drag and drop that property into the view plane
This section is good and next we click on Time Settings
I leave it at 7 days
I leave Breakdown by blank
We need to change Metrics to Properties
Navigate to Configuration > Security > Disconnect CD-ROM
Under Select put : is
Under Property Value type: false
Then click save
How to Turn Metric into Report
On the left plane you can click Reports
Select New Template
Give the Report a name and description
Filter for the keyword ISO and select the View we created earlier and drag it to the right plane
I select both PDF and CSV and click Save
Run the newly created report
Click Run
Select the Object – this could be a datacenter, cluster, vCenter or the entire vSphere World.
Then Click OK and the report will run
It will say Running until it completes then click on generated reports
Here is your report
You have the ability to download the PDF or CSV depending on how you like to perform your reporting. I always download both.
Summary:
As you can see there are a lot of parts to generate this custom report but it is worth it when it you need to pull this information rapidly. As always, I hope y’all found this helpful.