Folder by Path

There seem to be many vSphere environments where the same foldername is used multiple times. A blue folder with the name Servers is quite common for example.

If you need to retrieve such a folder with the Get-Folder cmdlet, you will have to walk the path to the folder leaf by leaf and use the Location parameter. It would be handier if you could just specify the path to the folder and retrieve the folder like that.

The following is a small function that will allow you to do just that.

Update August 6th 2020: The missing NoRecursion switch caused folders by the same name, further down in the hierarchy, to be returned as well.

Update July 5th 2019: The functions have been updated to support the situation where a user is connected to multiple vSphere Servers.

Update February 18th 2016: In some situations the function might return folders with the same name from different location. Fixed by adding NoRecursion on line 48
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Orphaned files and folders – Spring cleaning

In our PowerCLI book we presented a Delete-Harddisk function in Chapter 7.

One of our readers asked if that function could be used to remove orphaned VMDK files from one or more datastores. Now unfortunately that is not the case since the function we presented in chapter 7 uses the ReconfigVM_Task method to remove the harddisk.

In the PowerCLI Community there are some thread that provide scripts to report on orphaned VMDK files, but most of these are quite old.

So I decided to write a new script that would report on orphaned folders and VMDK files and that would have an option to remove these folders and files.

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Get the folderpath

A useful property that is obviously missing from the Get-Folder cmdlet, is the path of the folder. In the PowerCLI Community there are regularly threads that ask for this kind of information. Most of the time it concerns scripts to export/import folder structures or scripts to migrate vCenters.

Another property that is obviously missing, is the indication if a specific folder is a so-called “blue” or “yellow” folder.

To solve this problem once and for all, I wrote this short function, called Get-FolderPath, that will return you both of these properties.

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