Start VM from powered off state using pyvmomi

Question

So, I am trying to make a Python script using pyvmomi to control the state of a virtual machine I'm running on my ESXi server. Basically, I tried using connection.content.searchIndex.FindByIp(ip="the ip of the VM", vmSearch=True) to grab my VM and then power it on, but of course I cannot get the IP of the VM when it's off. So, I was wondering if there was any way I could get the VM, maybe by name or its ID? I searched around quite a bit but couldn't really find a solution. Either way, here's my code so far:

from pyVim import connect
# Connect to ESXi host
connection = connect.Connect("192.168.182.130", 443, "root", "password")

# Get a searchIndex object
searcher = connection.content.searchIndex

# Find a VM
vm = searcher.FindByIp(ip="192.168.182.134", vmSearch=True)

# Print out vm name
print (vm.config.name)

# Disconnect from cluster or host
connect.Disconnect(connection)

Answer 1

The searchindex doesn't have any methods to do a 'findbyname' so you'll probably have to resort to pulling back all of VMs and filtering through them client side.

Here's an example of returning all the VMs: https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi-community-samples/blob/master/samples/getallvms.py

Another option, if you're using vCenter 6.5+, there's the vSphere Automation SDK for Python where you can interact with the REST APIs to do a server side filter. More info: https://github.com/vmware/vsphere-automation-sdk-python

Answer 2

This code might prove helpful:

from pyVim.connect import SmartConnect
from pyVmomi import vim
import ssl

s=ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1)
s.verify_mode=ssl.CERT_NONE
si= SmartConnect(host="192.168.100.10", user="admin", pwd="admin123",sslContext=s)
content=si.content

def get_all_objs(content, vimtype):
        obj = {}
        container = content.viewManager.CreateContainerView(content.rootFolder, vimtype, True)
        for managed_object_ref in container.view:
                obj.update({managed_object_ref: managed_object_ref.name})
        return obj

vmToScan = [vm for vm in get_all_objs(content,[vim.VirtualMachine]) if "ubuntu-16.04.4" == vm.name]