Easily retrieve VM memory overhead using the vSphere 6.0 API

A handy API that was introduced in vSphere 6.0 is the ability to easily retrieve the amount of memory overhead for a given Virtual Machine. Though this was not a common task, it was not trivial to find and often required customers to scoure the various VM logs. In vSphere 6.0, we now have a module called the Overhead Memory Manager which provides a very simple API method called the LookupVmOverheadMemory() to retrieve this information. I know this question has come up from time to time and I figure I do a quick blog about it as I have not seen anyone write about this API yet.

I have created example implementation using PowerCLI to exercise this API which I have called Get-VMMemovehead.ps1 Once the method is loaded, you pipe the output of the Get-VM cmdlet to this new operation as seen in the screenshot below:

Get-VM "vcenter60-2" | Get-VMMemOverhead