VI Powershell: Creating a PSDrive to browse your inventory

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