VQUERY
A tool for querying vCenter for various information. It is designed to return simple parsable output.


INSTALL
If you have downloaded the tar.gz package, you can install using the setup.py script.
$ sudo python setup.py install

The project is submitted to pypi so the easiest way of installation is using pip.
$ pip install vquery


AUTHENTICATION
There are two ways to input your vCenter credentials 
- supply them as parameters on the command line
- specify credentials in the file ~/.vquery

The .vquery file
This file will be created for you (if it doesn't already exist) once you launch vQuery without credentials.
The purpose of the .vquery file is to store connection profiles, which will make life a lot easier for you,
especially if you connect to various vCenter servers on a regular basis.

(A brief note on security: Storing your password in plain text is obviously not ideal. My recommendation is
to omit the password and let vQuery prompt you for it instead. If you choose to store complete credentials in
.vquery, I advise you to set up a vSphere account with read-only access. By default, .vquery file is created
with permissions 600.)

The command line authentication parameters are:
  --server=<server>              Specify IP or hostname of vCenter.
  --username=<username>          Specify username for vCenter connection.
  --password=<password>          Specify password for vCenter connection.
  --vc=<connection profile>      Specify the ID of vCenter connection profile from config file. 

If you have created a connection profile called 'default' in .vquery, this profile will be used to 'fill in
the blanks' whenever any credentials are missing. If you only have one vCenter server, you can specify it
using the default tag for convenience.


USAGE GUIDE
The usage structure of the command is:
$ vq (object type) [search names...] [optional flags] [auth options]
The object type can be vm, datastore, network, host, cluster, datacenter or folder.

$ vq --help
A pretty good place to start.

$ vq vm
This will simply list all VM names in the environment, using connection profile 'default' if it exists.

$ vq host --vc=lab
List all hosts, using connection profile 'lab' as specified in my ~/.vquery file.

$ vq datastore --server=myvc.vsphere.local --username=admin@vsphere.local
List all datastores, supplying some credentials on the command line.

$ vq datastore myDS01 --vm
You can provide search names to narrow down results. --vm flag will list VMs stored on said datastore.

$ vq vm myVM01 myVM02 --network
We can provide several search names. --network flag displays associated networks.

$ vq vm --ip
List all VMs and associated guest IP addresses.

$ vq host ESXi02 --all
Search for host ESXi02 and display verbose information.

$ vq vm myVM01 -pfio
We can use the shorthand version of flags and combine them. 
Here we search for VM myVM01 and display power state, folder location, IP address and Guest OS.

As you can see, almost all object types and flags can be combined to retrieve all sorts of information.
For instance, you can quickly figure out which datastores or networks are connected to each host, which
VMs are connected to a network, which datastores have an older VMFS version, which VMs have ageing 
snapshots, or simply check how much storage space is left on a guest. Many more use cases are possible!


VERSIONS
0.3 / Syntax changes for greater usage convenience.
0.2 / I've rewritten the script to use property templates for much speedier queries. Earlier script
did not scale well in larger environments.


CREDITS
Script by Jakob Svanholm - jakob@rymdlego.se
I tip my hat to 'dnaeon' for pchelper property templates.