Detecting vSphere VM OS Mis-Matches with VCF Operations

As you've likely noticed, there are times your vSphere VMs won't have the same value for Guest OS from vCenter and Guest OS from Tools.

Guest OS from vCenter is set at build/deployment time and won't change. Guest OS from Tools is updated as the OS changes, is upgraded, etc. I wanted to know which of my VMs had an OS mis-match, so I built a quick Dashboard.

This works for small environments, but what if I had 1000s of VMs to check. Another way to discover VMs with OS mis-matches if to define a Symptom comparing the two properties, like this.

Create an Alert Definition using that Symptom Definition and you'll soon have Alerts telling you which of your VMs have OS mis-matches.

Finally, another way to identify these VM OS mis-matches is by creating a Super Metric that will render a binary result (0 or 1) should the VM properties in question not match. I built a Super Metric like this:

count({‌This Resource: ‌summary|guest|fullName, where=({metric=summary|guest|fullName} equals {metric=config|guestFullName})}) 

This will result in 1 if the properties match and 0 if they don't, which you can then use back in your dashboard to highlight the ones that don't match.

If you'd like this Super Metric you can get it here. Hope this was helpful, enjoy!