PowerCLI: Retrieving ESXi Host System Management Network IP Address

I was recently looking at retrieving the allocated management network IP address for a large number of ESXi host systems and therefore decided to use the ‘Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter’ cmdlet to which I would filter based on the device name value retrieved from the ESXi host system. In its simpliest form the cmdlet can be invoked as below:

Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost esxi1.dean.local

In this instance I wanted to retrieve only the allocated IP address to the device name vmk0 (management network) for all ESXi host systems in a datacenter, which could be achieved by invoking the cmdlet with the filter to retrieve only the host network adapter where the device name was equal to ‘vmk0’

Get-Datacenter Edinburgh | Get-VMHost | Select-Object @{N="Name";E={$_.Name}},@{N="Management Network";E={(Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost $_.Name  | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "vmk0"}).IP }}

As the above retrieved both the name of the ESXi host system and the allocated IP address of the management network this provided me with the information required. However, in the future would I need to repeat this task with the same or different requirements. Therefore I decided to create a function which would retrieve the management network IP address for a filtered list of ESXi host systems to which this could be targeted at a vCenter Server System, Datacentre, Cluster or a particular list of ESXi host systems., as below.

The function will establish a connection to the vCenter Server System retrieve a collection of ESXi host systems as specified or retrieve a collection of all ESXi host systems managed by that vCenter Server and return the host name and management network IP address.

Function Get-VMHostManagementNetwork { 

Param ([Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][String[]] $VIServer,[String[]] $Datacenter,[String[]] $Cluster,[String[]] $VMHost) 

If (-not (Get-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) {Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core | Out-Null}

Connect-VIServer $VIServer | Out-Null 

If ($Datacenter){$VMHosts = Get-Datacenter $Datacenter | Get-VMHost} 
ElseIf ($Cluster) {$VMHosts = Get-Cluster $Cluster | Get-VMHost} 
ElseIf ($VMHost) {$VMHosts = Get-VMHost $VMHost} 
Else {$VMHosts = Get-VMHost}

$VMHosts | Select-Object @{N="Name";E={$_.Name}},@{N="Management Network";E={(Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost $_.Name  | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "vmk0"}).IP }}
}