Managing datastores

Before we go ahead and start a discussion on how we can add different types of storage to an ESXi host, we will discuss a few basic tasks, such as copy and move operations on datastores. In the following example, we have the cmdlets that we can use to generally achieve the tasks:

• Copy-DatastoreItem
• Get-Datastore
• Move-Datastore
• New-Datastore
• Remove-Datastore
• Set-Datastore

The first cmdlet Copy-DatastoreItem lets you copy data from a local machine disk to a remote datastore:

PS C:\> Copy-DatastoreItem vmstore:\Datacenter\vsanDatastore\Test-VM\* C:\VMFolder\Test-VM\ -Force

This will copy the files related to Test-VM to a local folder in the local system.

As the name suggests, the Get-Datastore cmdlet provides a list of datastores in the systems:

PS C:\> Get-Datastore

Name                               FreeSpaceGB      CapacityGB
----                               -----------      ----------
datastore1                              11.628          12.500
datastore1 (3)    ...