Report VM reconfigurations

One this that has always bugged me with vCenter UIs is seeing a reconfigure VM task but not being able to tell what was changed. Some times in an investigation this can be very important.

While looking at Event objects one day I discovered an attribute called configchanges on a reconfigured event object. In there are 3 text string called Modified,Added and Deleted. After a bit of tidying up (splitting them up by semi colons and removing the spaces) I was left with something I can work with.

So here is a quick script to read the most recent 150 VM Events looking for any reconfigure events. Once we have them the script will list out the details in a CSV.

Here is the Script

$Report = @()

# Im just getting all VMs. you can add something here so $VMs contains only the VMs you want.
$AllVMs = get-vm


foreach ($VM in $AllVMs)
{
    # im just looking at the last 150 events but we could loook at time ranges
    #$ReconfigEvts = $VM | Get-VIEvent -Start ((get-date).addhours(-$hours)) -Finish (get-date) | where{$_.FullFormattedMessage -match "Reconfigured"}
    $ReconfigEvts = $VM | Get-VIEvent -MaxSamples 150 | where{$_.FullFormattedMessage -match "Reconfigured"}

    foreach ($ReconfigEvt in $ReconfigEvts)
    {
        # confs will just be text so need to get them in at an array
        $ConfChanges = $ReconfigEvt.configchanges.Modified.Split(";").trim()
        $ConfAdds = $ReconfigEvt.configchanges.Added.Split(";").trim()
        $ConfRemoves = $ReconfigEvt.configchanges.Deleted.Split(";").trim()

        # one row for each bit of the reconfig Event modifications
        foreach ($ConfChange in $ConfChanges)
        {
            if($ConfChange.length -gt 1)
            {
                $tempObj = "" | select VM,EventID,User,Date,Modified,Added,Deleted
                $tempObj.VM       = $VM.name
                $tempObj.EventID  = $ReconfigEvt.Key
                $tempObj.User     = $ReconfigEvt.UserName
                $tempObj.Date     = $ReconfigEvt.CreatedTime
                $tempObj.Modified = $ConfChange
                $tempObj.Added    = ''
                $tempObj.Deleted  = ''
                $Report += $tempObj
            }
        }

        # one row for each bit of the reconfig Event Adds
        foreach ($ConfAdd in $ConfAdds)
        {
            if($ConfAdd.length -gt 1)
            {
                $tempObj = "" | select VM,EventID,User,Date,Modified,Added,Deleted
                $tempObj.VM       = $VM.name
                $tempObj.EventID  = $ReconfigEvt.Key
                $tempObj.User     = $ReconfigEvt.UserName
                $tempObj.Date     = $ReconfigEvt.CreatedTime
                $tempObj.Modified = ''
                $tempObj.Added    = $ConfAdd
                $tempObj.Deleted  = ''
                $Report += $tempObj
            }
        }

        # one row for each bit of the reconfig Event Deletions
        foreach ($ConfRemove in $ConfRemoves)
        {
            if($ConfRemove.length -gt 1)
            {
                $tempObj = "" | select VM,EventID,User,Date,Modified,Added,Deleted
                $tempObj.VM       = $VM.name
                $tempObj.EventID  = $ReconfigEvt.Key
                $tempObj.User     = $ReconfigEvt.UserName
                $tempObj.Date     = $ReconfigEvt.CreatedTime
                $tempObj.Modified = ''
                $tempObj.Added    = ''
                $tempObj.Deleted  = $ConfRemove
                $Report += $tempObj
            }
        }
    }
}

$Report | export-csv ".\VM_Config_Changes.csv" -NoTypeInformation

The output will show the following columns.

“VM”,”EventID”,”User”,”Date”,”Modified”,”Added”,”Deleted”

The following shows a simple CPU and memory modification.

“VM”,”EventID”,”User”,”Date”,”Modified”,”Added”,”Deleted”
“VM01″,”806356″,”jason”,”15/06/2020 18:10:31″,”config.hardware.numCPU: 1 -> 2″,””,””
“VM01″,”806356″,”jason”,”15/06/2020 18:10:31″,”config.hardware.memoryMB: 48 -> 2048″,””,””
“VM01″,”806356″,”jason”,”15/06/2020 18:10:31″,”config.cpuAllocation.shares.shares: 1000 -> 2000″,””,””
“VM01″,”806356″,”jason”,”15/06/2020 18:10:31″,”config.memoryAllocation.shares.shares: 480 -> 20480″,””,””

And save all that to a CSV file. Very handy.