I recently encountered an interesting question, maybe not the one you will see every day. A vCenter Center server runs a large number of Clusters; the VMs on those clusters are controlled by a considerable number of DRS rules. The question that raised; “How do we know if the DRS rules we once designed are still in place?” In the course of time, rules can be disabled, VM or Host groups does not match any more. Trying to answer this question by going through the vCenter Server configuration is not the way to go.

Thankfully, the VMware PowerCLI contains a useful Cmdlet Get-DrsRule that enables you to create a dump of the configured rules for each cluster. This makes checking your configuration a lot easier.

But there is another thing, now we know about the configuration, but what do we know about the actual situation? For instance, VM to Host affinity has “should” and “must” rules, but to what extent is a “should” rule fulfilled?

So time to create a PowerShell script which performs the following tasks; for each Cluster within a vCenter Server, a dump of the configured DRS rule is made. The second part of the script determines on which host a VM is running and compares it to the configured rules. The script will also report if a DRS rule is disabled and displays the power state of each VM. You will probably worry less about a powered down VM.

The script can be found here on GitHub.

I am aware that the script and my programming skills are far from perfect, so expect updated versions in the future.