Dynamic group for associated VM's on an ESX host

ahamiltonXD

Someone asked a similar question 2 years ago with no responses, so I am going to dip my toe in...

Looking to create dynamic groups that contain the associated VM's from each ESX host in our environment... my thought is to use the dynamic group to mute alerting when the ESX host is down. We have already have a node custom property to identify the common ESX host assignment for each VM, but the continuity is lost when an administrator vMotion's a virtual machine for whatever reason and does not put it back where it normally belongs... so hoping to use a dynamic query to manage the discrepancies with the custom property values.

So far, I cannot find a way to select a VM host and enumerate those currently hosted VM's using a dynamic query.

adam.beedell

Dynamic groups seems like a hard way to solve this problem. (and one that wont scale nicely as the number of hosts increase and auto vmotions occur)

You want less emails when a host is down right?

(I'd argue if they're all down you may just want the emails tbh, vmotion should solve that problem and if it doesnt you've indeed got a bunch of problems)

A where condition for VM status down and host status not down kinda gets you there with waaaay less stuff

Or if it's more about figuring out vms per host, then the relationship is like this, reccomend starting from the lower level

select vm.VirtualMachineID from orion.vim.VirtualMachines vm where vm.HostID = 10

super dont reccomend dynamic queries for this.

 

Please note if you've got nodes not just VMs and VirtualHosts there's some polling cycle stuff to keep an eye on. If the host and the vm are both nodes they may be on the same polling frequency, if there's a vm and a vh same again, but a node VM and a virtualhost are probably quite different. So you might not see the VH's status update in advance of the vm node level alerts going off