Just stumbled upon this cool article about mounting your VI inventory as a drive via Powershell:

source – Hal Rottenberg aka halr9000:

  1. Establish a connection to your the server using the Get-VIServer command:
    Get-VIServer -Server
    


    for example,

    Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.10.10
    


    When prompted, provide the administrator’s username and password to authenticate access on the server.

  2. Get the root folder of the server:
    $root = Get-Folder -NoRecursion
    
  3. Create a PowerShell drive named VI, based on the server root folder. You can use the built-in New-psDrive cmdlet.
    New-PSDrive -Location $root -Name vi -PSProvider VimInventory -Root '\' 


    In this release, a single backslash is the required value for the -Root parameter.

  4. Access the new drive by typing the following command:
    cd vi:
    


    To list the drive content, use Get-ChildItem or its alias Dir.

  5. Navigate through your server inventory using the cd command with the full path to the host. For a fictional VI inventory it may looks like the following:
    cd Folder01\DataCenter01\host\Web\LiveHost01