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Updating OVF properties for a VM using vSphere API and PowerCLI 

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Deploying a new OVA/OVF containing OVF properties that need to be configured is super easy using PowerCLI's Get-OvfConfiguration and Import-VApp cmdlets. Many examples can be found online including the PowerCLI Deployment Github repository.

However, once an OVA/OVF has been deployed and running as a standard Virtual Machine, I found there were no out of the box cmdlets for manipulating the OVF properties for a VM as shown in the screenshot below.


Online searches also did not yield any results and hence the opopournity and article 🙂

Just like any VM reconfiguration, you will need to use the vSphere API ReconfigVM_Task() and to update various OVF settings for a VM, you will need to pass in VAppConfigSpec along with a VAppPropertySpec containing the individual OVF property values to update.

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NSX-T PowerCLI community module

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During the development of my automated NSX-T 2.0 lab deployment script, I had created several PowerCLI functions using the new NSX-T cmdlets and NSX-T APIs to help me test and troubleshoot. I finally got a chance to clean up the code as well as package them all up into an NSXT.psm1 module which hopefully can benefit others. For those of you who are looking for a primer on how to get started with the new NSX-T PowerCLI cmdlets and the NSX-T APIs, check out this awesome post from Romain Decker.

The NSXT module contains the following 8 functions:

  • Get-NSXTComputeManager
  • Get-NSXTController
  • Get-NSXTFabricNode
  • Get-NSXTFirewallRule
  • Get-NSXTIPPool
  • Get-NSXTLogicalSwitch
  • Get-NSXTManager
  • Get-NSXTTransportZone

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When to use Move-VM cmdlet vs xMove.ps1 script for performing Cross vCenter vMotions?

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Since publishing my Automating Cross vCenter vMotion between the same and different SSO Domain article back in early 2016, I have had a large number of customers reach out to me and share their success stories of allowing them to perform datacenter migrations to consolidating vCenter Servers all due to this awesome capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.0. In fact, many of the VM migration numbers were in the 4,000 to 8,000+ range which completely blew me away. It was great to hear from customers on how the xMoveVM.ps1 script had enabled them to do things that was simply not possible before, especially without impacting their workloads.

I still get pinged on a regular basis from customers about using my script and one thing that surprises many customers when I mention to them that this functionality has already been ported over to the native Move-VM cmdlet that was introduced with the PowerCLI 6.5 release. This had always been my original intention to provide an example using our vSphere API and enabling our customers in the short term and working with Alan Renouf and the PowerCLI team to get this folded back into the official PowerCLI cmdlets. This means, you no longer have to use my script for basic Cross vCenter vMotions whether that is between the same or different SSO Domain, which is quite nice as the number of user inputs is significantly reduced by using Move-VM cmdlet.

UPDATE (01/01/2018) - One additional option is the recently released Cross vCenter vMotion Utility Fling. For more details, please have a look at the blog post here.

Lets take a look at an example below where I have a VM called TestVM-1 which is residing in vcenter65-1 and I want to vMotion it to vcenter65-3:


With just 5 simple and easy to read lines of PowerCLI, you can perform this operation:

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