VMware labs released a new tool that really impressed me.

Its’ called Inventory Snapshot, and allows you to create a complete snapshot of a vsphere datacenter, or a part of it, and then rebuild it. With this tool we can select a datacenter and export in a PowerCLI script all its configurations (datacenter, cluster, hosts, resource pools….); executing than the powershell script, we can recreate the same configuration.

As suggested by the engineers who created the tool, there are some scenarios where this tool can be helpful:

– we can create first a datacenter in a lab and then migrate it in production

– we can migrate environments 4.0 -> 4.1 without the need to rebuild everything by hand

– we can use this tool to backup configurations

About this last thing, have a look at the following video they realized. From minute 10 going on, a datacenter is completely deleted and then automatically rebuilt by the script. Terrific!