Many moons ago, when I started playing with the wonderfulness that is PowerCLI, one of the first things I wrote with a particular problem in mind was a small script to quickly locate the host running our vCenter server in case anything went wrong and I lost access to vCenter directly.
So instead of trying to connect to every possible host of the cluster manually with the vSphere Client, why not just connect to all of them via PowerCLI and query them quickly?
Where’s Waldo?
This resulted in the small, simple script posted below. For this script, you can provide either a list of hosts to connect to, an alias for a cluster which member hosts you pre-populated in the script, along with one or more search strings. This search is matched against the VM names and outputs the list of found VMs with their current power state and most importantly, the host running the VM. This way you can get a VM-Host mapping of not only your vCenter VM, but other VMs as well.
I remembered this script while reading a cool article on v-front.de about various other ways to keep track on which host your vCenter VM is running.
I “polished” the old, simple code a bit but yeah, I’m still pretty horrible when it comes to scripting. Anyways, here it is in case anyone finds it useful: