Of course I would rather have all my hosts in my System Center VMM 2012 SP1 but if I do not, or I just as an ITPro admin want to check if there are some new Hyper-V servers out there in my Active Directory and if they have VM´s on them I can use PowerShell.

I have looked at Ravikanth´s blog and done some modifications, also I am using the Win2012 and Powershell v3.

I can with the following powershell cmd get all hyper-v virtual machines in my Active Directory (of some reason the VMware machines do not get registered in the AD as virtual machines). With powershell version 3 it autoloads the Active Directory Module, this requires though that I have the feature RSAT-AD-PowerShell installed, easily done with Get-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-PowerShell | Add-WindowsFeature.

Get-ADObject -Filter 'Name -like "*Virtual*"' | %{$_.DistinguishedName.Split(",")[1].replace("CN=","") }

I cannot do so much more with this information, what I want is to check a list of Hyper-V servers and also try to get the VM´s on them, sadly only win2012 servers can interact with the hyper-v powershell module and give that info, but hey whom has win 2008 r2 hyper-v servers 😉

This first query gives me all Hyper-V servers in the domain, 2008->2012

Get-ADObject -Filter 'Name -like "*Hyper-V"' | %{$_.DistinguishedName.Split(",")[1].replace("CN=","") }

This next query uses that info and asks the Hyper-V servers for their VM´s

Get-ADObject -Filter 'Name -like "*Hyper-V"' | %{$_.DistinguishedName.Split(",")[1].replace("CN=","") } | %{get-vm -ComputerName $_ -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue} | ft ComputerName,Name,State,Uptime -AutoSize

I can also use this to do things with the VM´s, like starting or stopping, observe that i just want to start the VM´s that start with the name test*.

Get-ADObject -Filter 'Name -like "*Hyper-V"' | %{$_.DistinguishedName.Split(",")[1].replace("CN=","") } | %{get-vm test* -ComputerName $_ -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue} | Start-VM