Find VMs being replicated to a datastore with Get-VmdkFolders

I’m using vSphere Replication to replicate a number of VMs to a datastore which is being decommissioned. I can’t reconfigure replication by code (I’ve mentioned that there’s no public API or PowerCLI around the vSphere Replication functionality in vSphere 6.5 before- most recently on Twitter)  and I can’t multi-select VMs in the vSphere Web Client and reconfigure en-mass through the GUI.

There’s also no way of telling which VMs are being replicated to this datastore without going into the reconfigure dialogues for each one individually. That’s a lot of clicking before even starting to update the configuration.

I’ve put together a PowerCLI function takes a little of this pain away by establishing which folders on a given datastore contain VMDK files. I’ve already migrated any Virtual Machines off so any remaining VMDKs on the volume should be associated with a replication process. Additionally in this case the default folder name was used when setting up the replication so all the folder names correspond to a VM.

The function is called “Get-VmdkFolders” (as there’s potentially other uses for it) and is available on GitHub here. With this I now have a list of VMs that need manually reconfiguring.

1PS C:\> Get-VmdkFolders "MyReplicationDatastore"
2MyVM1
3MyVM2
4MyVM3
5MyVM5
6MyVM7