My good friend has found another VI Toolkit call that is amazingly slow compared to pulling useful data from it. I’ve done performance testing before of Get-VM against Get-View to get to the useful data needed day to day.   In that test using Get-View was 18x faster than using Get-VM.

This past week he was able to dig through the API/mob to find disk data for individual VMs for an internal tracking and reporting system we have.   This time he found a way to get the majority of useful data from Get-Harddisk a different way.   Rather significant change in speed with another couple hours of work.

This report he generates goes through about 1/2 of our VMs to pull VMDK information.

Get-HardDisk => 35 hours

New method => 2 mins 15 seconds

Yes.  That’s right.   976 times faster.   Do the math yourself.