PowerCLI 5.1 Release1 Move-VM Bug

By john

January 22, 2013

While trying to write a script to move our VMs to a newly created datastore cluster I discovered a bug in PowerCLI. The issue only comes into play when trying to convert to thin provisioning. I am using PowerCLI 5.1 Release 1 build 793510.

If you run this command you get a giant trace stack:

Running the same command without the -DiskStorageFormat flag will work fine:

Also if you run the command with the thin provision flag against a datastore and not a datastore cluster it works fine as well:

I posted on the VMware PowerCLI forum and it was confirmed that this was a bug.

Commenter LucD (http://www.lucd.info/) used Onyx to discover that the cmdlet fills in the RelocateSpec.disk property while the SDK Reference seems to say “RelocateSpec.disk.datastore; the fields should be unset if the user wants SDRS recommendations“. If I do the call with an empty RelocateSpec.disk property, the method works without a problem.

He also came up with this work around:

This worked great to get around the issue. I will be posting soon outlining why I needed to do this 🙂

powercli