I was recently doing some work with my VMware Cloud on AWS instance and I needed to verify something in the vSphere API. Since I already had a browser open, rather than context switch, I decided to quickly open up the vSphere MOB which is a debugging tool that provides a browser interface to the vSphere SOAP API. While going through the Virtual Machine view, I was pleasantly surprised to see a new VM config property called createDate which looks to give you the original date/time of when the VM was first created!
This is probably one of the most frequently asked question that I have seen from VI Admins around basic VM management and I am sure everyone has probably had a need to pull this type of information at least once in their career. Historically, VM creation date was not an easy thing to thing to find and success of retrieving that data was dependent on the retention of your vCenter Server Events database since that is where the information is stored. This means if you only retain 6 months worth of historical events, you will not be able to retrieve creation dates for VMs that were created prior to that.