With the new 5.5 R2 release of PowerCLI we introduced end-to-end support for the vSphere Tagging functionality. You can now automate Tag and TagCategory management, assign tags on objects and search for objects by tag. This blog post will give you an overview of the new functionalities and a couple of useful scripts:
- One for exporting/importing of tags
- One for converting the legacy custom attributes to tags
Managing Tag Categories
Tag Categories allow you to group related tags together. When you define a category, you can also specify which object types its tags can be applied to and whether more than one tag in the category can be applied to an object. Creating a category with PowerCLI is easy:
New-TagCategory –Name [name] -Description [description] -Cardinality [single/multiple] –EntityType [list of types]
For example let’s create a category that will contain a tag for each vSphere user. We’ll name this category “Owner” and use it to tag the owners of Virtual Machines. The tags will only be applicable to Virtual Machines and a Virtual Machine can have only one owner. The following script creates such a category:
New-TagCategory –Name “Owner” –Cardinality single –EntityType VirtualMachine
The “-Cardinality” parameter specifies whether a single or multiple tags from this category can be applied to the same object at the same time. If you don’t specify it the default is “single”. The “-EntityType” parameter allows you to specify the object types to which you can attach tags from this category. If you omit the parameter by default the category will be applicable to all supported entity types.
The full list of supported entity types is: VirtualMachine, VM, VMHost, Folder, Datastore, DatastoreCluster, Cluster, ResourcePool, DistributedSwitch, DistributedPortGroup, VirtualPortGroup, VApp, Datacenter, All.
Modifying an existing TagCategory is done through Set-TagCategory cmdlet. You can change its name, description, cardinality (you can only extend it to “multiple”, restricting it to “single” is not possible) and add more entity types (again you can only extend the applicable entity types).
In our previous example the “Owner” category is only applicable to Virtual Machines, however VApps can also have an owner. Let’s modify the category to allow tagging VApps as well:
Get-TagCategory “Owner” | Set-TagCategory –AddEntityType VApp
Removing an existing category is just as easy by using the Remove-TagCategory cmdlet. Note that by removing a category you are also removing all tags in it and any assignments of these tags! Here is an example:
Remove-TagCategory “Owner”
Managing Tags
Once you have a tag category you are able to create new tags in it. This is done through the New-Tag cmdlet. For example in our “Owner” category let’s create a tag for John Smith:
New-Tag –Name “jsmith” –Category “Owner”
You can also create multiple tags – by reading the input values from CSV file or from other cmdlets. Here is how to create tags for each user in the “Example.org” domain:
# Retrieve all user accounts in the “Example.org” domain
$userList = Get-VIAccount –User –Domain “Example.org”
# For each user account create a new tag based on the user’s Id
foreach ($user in $userList) { New-Tag –Category “Owner” –Name $user.Id –Description $user.Description }
Modifying an existing tag is done through the Set-Tag cmdlet. It allows you to change the tag’s name and description:
Get-Tag “jsmith” –Category “Owner” | Set-Tag –Description “John Smith”
Removing a tag is done through Remove-Tag cmdlet, similar to removing a category. When removing a tag you will automatically remove any assignments of this tag.
Now that you have created some tags – it’s time to put them to use. You can assign tag to an entity using the New-TagAssignment cmdlet. Here is how to assign the “jsmith” tag to the VMs that belong to John (we assume they have “jsmith” in their name):
Get-VM –Name *jsmith* | New-TagAssignment –Tag “jsmith”
You can easily retrieve all tag assignments on a given entity:
Get-VM jsmith_vm1 | Get-TagAssignment
Or you can retrieve all VMs that have a given tag associated with them:
Get-VM –Tag “jsmith”
If you want to build a report that displays information about your inventory objects and all tags associated with them – you can do that by using the New-VIProperty cmdlet to add a “Tag” property to your objects. Here is an example of how to do that for the VirtualMachines, but it is easily applicable to other types as well:
# First we want to define the new “Tag” property of the VirtualMachine object
New-VIProperty -Name Tag -ObjectType VirtualMachine -Value `
{ Get-TagAssignment -Entity $args[0] | select -ExpandProperty Tag }
# Now retrieve all VMs and their tags:
Get-VM | select Name, Tag
Exporting and importing tags
Now that you know the basics, let’s do something more advanced. If you have created all your tags with a script using the above commands it’s very easy to run this scrip on another vCenter Server in order to replicate all tags on that server as well. But if you created them by hand how can you replicate them on a different VC? Well, here is one solution, using the attached script “ExportImportTags.ps1” you will be able to export your tag configuration from one VC and then import it to another (one or multiple).
To use the script – simply download it from here and save it in a folder of your preference. Start PowerCLI and load the script:
. <path_to_folder>\ExportImportTags.ps1
Then connect to the VC you want to export tags from:
$sourceVC = Connect-VIServer <connection_parameters>
To export all tags use the Export-Tags function. It accepts two parameters, the server from which to export the tags and a destination file where to save them:
Export-Tags –Server $sourceVC –Destination C:\vc1_tags.txt
Then connect to the VC(s) that you want to import those tags to:
$destinationVC = Connect-VIServer <connection_parameters>
To import the tags use the Import-Tags function. It accepts two parameters, the server on which to import the tags and a source file from which to read them (the file produced by Export-Tags earlier):
Import-Tags –Server $destinationVC –Source C:\vc1_tags.txt
That’s it! You now have the same tag configuration across all your VCs.
Converting your existing custom attributes to tags
What if you are using the legacy custom attributes and want to convert those to tags? The attached “ConvertCustomAttributesToTags.ps1” script will do that for you. The script will scan your existing custom attributes and annotation values and based on those create the corresponding tag categories and tags. It will then assign the newly created tags to your inventory items. Using the script is done in the same way as above, download it from here, start PowerCLI, load the script and connect to your vCenter server:
. <path_to_folder>\ ConvertCustomAttributesToTags.ps1
$sourceVC = Connect-VIServer <connection_parameters>
To run the script just call the ConvertCustomAttributesToTags function and pass it the server you want to operate on:
ConvertCustomAttributesToTags $server
Once the function completes you will have tags matching your existing custom attribute hierarchy. If you like you can remove the old custom attributes.
![clip_image002[8]](http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/files/2013/10/clip_image0028.jpg "clip_image002[8]")
This post was created by Dimitar Barfonchovski.Dimitar joined VMware and the PowerCLI team in 2007. He is member of the development part of the team and his main responsibilities are the functional design and implementation of features for the vSphere and vCloud PowerCLI components.
As with all members of the team, he is working to deliver a good and valuable product. He is also working to improve all processes and tools involved in the product development and validation.