PowerCLI: Find VMs Based on Virtual Hardware Version

Hello again, everyone! For my fifth post for this year’s #BlogtoberTech challenge, I decided to share a script I recently wrote that seeks out virtual machines in a vSphere environment based on a specific virtual hardware version. This sort of ties in with the BIOS and UEFI scripts I wrote earlier in the year to seek out VMs that may still be open to the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities (virtual hardware version 8 or older). Or perhaps someone wants to seek out VMs that may be good candidates to enable Secure Boot (virtual hardware 13 or newer with EFI boot firmware configured).

In the initial version of this script, I ask the user to pick the vCenter to connect to, the datacenter object to scan, and then the virtual hardware version to seek out. If VMs of virtual hardware n are found, the user has the option of exporting the results to a CSV file. Otherwise, a dialog box will appear (via Out-GridView) that shows the results of the can. If, however, no VMs with a specified virtual hardware version are found, it will simply let the user know that “No VMs with virtual hardware n were found.”

As usual, the latest version of this script can be found over on my GitHub page, but here’s the script as it was written at the time of this post:

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