One thing that we all do quite regularly is pinging servers. In a medium/big environment there can be a lot of VMs and I can’t remember all the IP addresses or even the hostnames, which is annoying when I want to ping one of them. It’s still easy to find on the web client or with PowerCLI but it would be even easier to just ping the VM.

The purpose of this script is to ping a VM object in PowerCLI on all its IP addresses. Of course the VMware Tools need to be installed for it to work.

Instead of looking for what is the IP or the hostname of this VM, we just ping a VM object.

For example if a VM has 3 virtual NICs and 3 IP addresses, by pinging this VM, a ping will be issued to all 3 IPs.

Usage

Ping a single VM:

Get-VM My-VM | VMPing  
VMPing My-VM

Ping the VMs in a folder (foreach needed when more than 1 objects input):

Get-VM -Location MyFolder | Foreach-object {$_ | VMPing}

Issue 2 pings to all the VMs of a host indefinitely:

While ($true) {Get-VMhost Host10 | Get-VM | Foreach-object {$_ | VMping -count 2}}

These are just a few examples of what it can be used for.

The parameters

• -Count or -n : Number of pings
• -Delayms : Time in ms between 2 pings
• -Timeout or -w : Timeout …
• -Continuous or -t : doesn’t stop pinging (can’t be used with count)
• -enableIPv6 : If you want to ping the VM on its IPv6 addresses as well

Script

Available here.

Function VMPing {

[CmdletBinding(DefaultParameterSetName="1")]

param(
    [parameter(position=0,ValueFromPipeline=$True,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyname=$True,Mandatory=$True)]
    $VM,

    [parameter(parametersetname=1)][Alias('n')][int]$Count = 4,
    [parameter(parametersetname=2)][Alias('t')][switch]$Continuous,
    [ValidateRange(50,10000)][int]$Delayms = 700,
    [Alias('w')][int]$Timeout = 800,

    [switch]$enableIPv6
)

    TRY {

        IF (!($VM -as [VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.types.V1.Inventory.VirtualMachine]) -as [bool]) {
            $VMnotFound = $VM
            $VM = Get-VM $VM -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
            IF (!$VM) {throw "$VMnotFound not found"}
        } 

            
        IF ($VM.powerstate -eq "poweredon") {

            $IP = $VM.ExtensionData.guest.net.ipaddress
            IF (!$enableIPv6) {$IP = $IP | where {($_ -as [ipaddress]).AddressFamily -eq "InterNetwork"}} #exclude IPv6 addresses

            $ping = New-Object system.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping
            $r = 0

                while ($r -lt $count) {

                    $Table = @()

                    $IP | ForEach-Object {
                        $Result = $ping.Send($_,$Timeout)
                        [pscustomobject]@{

                            VM             = $VM.name
                            IP             = $_
                            Time           = IF ($result.Status -eq "Success") {$result.RoundtripTime} ELSE {$result.Status}
                            TTL            = $result.Options.Ttl

                        } 
                    }
                    Sleep -Milliseconds $Delayms
                    IF (!$Continuous) {$r++}
            
              }

    } ELSE {Write-Warning "$($VM.name) is powered off"}

    } CATCH {
        Write-Warning $_.Exception -ErrorAction Stop
    }
}