Today a little trick on how to use RVTools to create an audit trail.
Maybe you want to know when the size of a particular virtual machine disk has changed, or you want to have historic information on virtual machine placement (for example when dealing with Oracle licensing). RVTools can help here.
If you don’t know RVTools you should go directly to www.robware.net. The tool is the most powerful option for vSphere inventory collection. You can create a csv or Excel file containing inventory data of your ESXi hosts, virtual machines, datastores, networks etc. RVTools is available for free, and should be in your tools library.
A powerful feature that not all people know, is running RVTools in batch or command-line mode. You can use this option to create cvs or Excel files straight from the command-line.
Some examples (from the RVTools manual):
RVTools.exe –passthroughAuth –s vc5.robware.local -c ExportAll2xls -d c:\temp
or
RVTools.exe -s virtualcenter.domain.local –u userid –p password -c ExportAll2xls -d directory
Now add this command line to task scheduler of Windows, and voilà you’ve got you RVtools audit trail creator. The manual includes a batch file example which make thinks even simpler.
Have fun! Hope this was helpful.
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