You can perform advanced searches, which use the complete filter set, to search for specific items of interest. For example, you can search for:
- Host, cluster, and datastore information.
- Events — including events that occurred more than 30 days ago that aren't displayed in the Events tab.
- Information about VMs that include guest operating system details.
- Costs for a given period. When filtering for costs, the values will be interpreted in your preferred currency.
When filtering on costs, we recommend you use "<" or ">" and not the "=" operator, since you may get slightly unexpected results around the boundaries of the filtering range due to rounding during currency conversion.
Additional things that you could search for in your virtualized environment include:
- Hosts with low resources.
- Datastore capacity issues, such as the amount of free capacity, the number of VMs out of inventory, and a search for the last datastore scan.
- VMs based on the datastore on which they reside and the type of datastore.
- VMs based on the host on which they reside.
- Events on a specific infrastructure element, such as a host, to determine why its speed slowed down and what resource changes took place.
- Unexpected events, such as failed datastore scans.
- Clusters that don't have DRS and HA enabled or are near-capacity or over-capacity based on CPU, memory or storage.
- Service requests that haven't been fulfilled within a certain number of days.
You have the option of:
- Saving the search parameters you select under a name of your choosing so that you can easily run the same search again. See Run and Schedule Saved Searches.
- Scheduling your saved search so that it runs automatically. See Schedule Tasks.
- Using a search previously created by you or someone else and then renaming it as another saved search.
- Using a public search.
Perform advanced searches
You can perform advanced searches using the complete filter set.
Access: | Tools > Search |
Available to: | All Access Rights Levels |
- Select the type of item that want to search for:
- Clusters
- Datastores
- Databases
- Events
- Hosts
- Service Requests
- VMs
- Virtual Services
- Optional: To select where to search, click
and select the location from the tree. - Select filters as shown in Search table information with filters. For more information on filters, see Properties Reference.
- When you add multiple filters to a search, Commander uses an AND search, not an OR search. For example, if you search for VMs where the Power State is "Running" and the Power State is "Not Running", the search won't return any results because a single VM can't have two power states. To search for two power states (or for any other property that would require an OR search), use two separate searches.
- Because properties can differ by cloud account type, the values you can specify for a property in search filters may differ from the displayed values for that property. For example, when searching, the Host property Migration has two selectable values: Yes and No. In the search results (as well as in the Details section and lists), the value for this property is displayed as either "VMotion is Enabled/Disabled" (for vCenter) or "Live Migration is Enabled/Disabled" (for SCVMM).
- Click Search.
The results of your search are displayed under a separate Results tab. You can:
- Click Save Search to save your search. For more information, see Run and Schedule Saved Searches.
- Click View Query to edit the search criteria displayed in the Results tab.
- Export your search results to CSV format. For more information, see Export Search Results.
You can also display different columns to view different types of information. For more information, see Add, remove, or rearrange table columns.