An interesting thread appeared on the VMware Community forums today under the PowerCLI section where someone asked how to find all the svMotions for the past month. LucD answered the post with the solution to get the events listed out for svMotions. I tried this out in my own environment (first of all I datastore migrated (svMotioned a couple of VMs to make sure there would be some events to find). However, I didn’t get any results back. At first I thought this may be because the event names had changed between vSphere 4 and vSphere 5.
After some looking into the last 5 events that had run by using “Get-VIEvent -MaxSamples 5” and looking at the .Info section for the svMotions, I found that their Info.DescriptionId sections were showing as “StorageResourceManager.applyRecommendation” rather than “VirtualMachine.relocate” as LucD’s script had indicated they should be. After digging some more this evening, I realised that maybe the difference was down to the fact that I was svMotioning VMs between Datastore Clusters, rather than between normal Datastores (not part of a DS Cluster). I tried svMotioning a VM to a normal Datastore, and low and behold the event’s Info.DescriptionId now appeared as “VirtualMachine.relocate”!
So the difference is kind of related to the vSphere edition (in the way that you only get SDRS / Datastore Clusters in vSphere 5. More specifically, the task/event difference is seen when using Storage vMotion to move a VM between two Datastores or two Datastore Clusters.
- Migrating VMs Between two Datastore Clusters, you see the event “Apply Storage DRS Recommendations“
- Migrating VMs Between two normal Datastores, or from a Datastore Cluster to a normal Datastore (or vice-versa) you see the event “Relocate virtual machine“.
Here are some screenshots to illustrate what I mean:
Here is the PowerCLI script used to list both types of events if you are using both (or just one of) the Datastore types – i.e. Datastore Clusters or normal Datastores. It is based off LucD’s script in the first post of this thread on VMware Communities, but just modified to also show the “Between Datastore Cluster” types of svMotions too.
Get-VIEvent -MaxSamples ([int]::MaxValue) -Start (Get-Date).AddMonths(-1) | Where { $_.GetType().Name -eq "TaskEvent" -and $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "VirtualMachine.relocate" -or $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "StorageResourceManager.applyRecommendation"} | Select CreatedTime, UserName, FullFormattedMessage | Out-GridView