I recently resignatured a datastore that housed all of my templates and ran into an issue with a bunch of datastores that wouldn’t unmount and a slew orphaned templates. To get rid of them, I had to unregister them all and then register them, but had a ton, so I didn’t want to do them one at a time.
Unregistering the VM templates is easy. Just select them all, right click and click “remove from inventory”. The registering part is harder – need to browse the datastore and then right click and add to inventory and give it a name. So, I did it with PowerCLI.
The first thing we want to do is get a list of all of the vmtx files in the datastore that the templates reside in. I do it like this:
$vmtxs = gci vmstore:\$((Get-Datacenter -name "DCpod"))\templates -Recurse -Include *.vmtx | select -exp datastorefullpath
You can list it and you should see something like this:
PowerCLI C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI> $vmtxs
[templates] Win8.1_Template/Win8.1_Template.vmtx
[templates] Windows 10 template/Windows 10 template.vmtx
[templates] Win2K8R2_Template_1/Win2K8R2_Template.vmtx
[templates] Ubuntu_Server_Template/Ubuntu_Server_Template.vmtx
[templates] Win2K12R2_Template/Win2K12R2_Template.vmtx
[templates] webservertemplate2/webservertemplate2.vmtx
With the list of files, you can loop through and register them all on a particular host like this:
PowerCLI C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI> foreach($vmtx in $vmtxs)
{
$currentname = ($vmtx -split "/|\.")[1]
$vm = new-template -name $currentname -templatefilepath $vmtx -vmhost esxhostname.domain.com
}