Make a clone of VMs to NAS – The PowerCLI way

Quick post, had a customer that yearly wants a clone of their VMs, copied to a NAS, and then shipped to customers HQ. The owner of the company put this as a requirement. Fair enough. I have almost always done the clone of the VMs by GUI, in the start, this was easy because they only had 5 servers, but they now have more. So this time I wanted to try and script it instead. It took me some extra time, but in the end, I think it’s worth it. My PowerShell skills are not great, still learning so bear with me.

# Variables
$vcenter = "<IP or hostname>"
$cluster = "<name of cluster that contains the servers>"
$nfsIP = "1.2.3.4"
$nfsMount = "/nfs"

# Getting VMware PowerShell Modules
Get-Module -Name vmware* -ListAvailable | Import-Module

# Connect to vcenter
Connect-VIServer -Server $vcenter -User <username>

# Mount NAS 
get-cluster $cluster | get-vmhost | new-datastore -nfs -name NAS -path $nfsMount -nfshost $nfsIP

# More Variables
$ds = get-datastore NAS
$tempHost = "esx74.domain.tld"
$vms = Get-VM -Name customer*

# Copy all 
foreach ($vm in $vms)
{
    new-vm -name "$($vm.name)-clone" -VM $vm -Datastore $ds -vmhost $tempHost
    Remove-VM -VM "$($vm.name)-clone" -DeleteFromDisk:$false -Confirm:$false -RunAsync
}

# Remove datastore from hosts again
Get-Cluster $cluster | Get-VMHost | Remove-Datastore -Datastore $ds