I’ve been starting to look at using the VI Toolkit which uses Powershell.   In doing this many of the command formats tend to be “Get-VM | Get-View” or “Get-VMHost | Get-View“.   So I’m off and figuring this out and I run a small script and say “Geez that took a long time to run”.   I’m talking to my co-worker (a pretty smart cookie) and he says “Why don’t you just use “Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine” and skip the middle man?”   Good point.  Didn’t know about that command.  Well this is just a tad bit faster.

Get-VM | Get-View timing in my script takes 1 minute and 37 seconds.

Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine takes an amazing 5.12 seconds.

The VI Toolkit developers have identified this as a serious issue are working on ways to speed this up and retain backwards compatibility.

So the lesson today is if you need to do a Get-View immediately after doing some set collection look at using the Get-View -ViewType instead.  It isn’t as readable though it gets the job done well.