VM : Quickly delete one or more VM

Hi guys,

In my labs I often have to provision a lot of “trashable” VMs and I wanted to run a single command to remove them easily.

From this idea I wrote a small script :

clear
$ExpectedPowerStatus = "PoweredOff"
$VMName = read-host 'Type the name of the VM to delete. If more than one VM are expected, use the wildcard "*"'
write-host $VMName -ForegroundColor Yellow

function getVMPowerStatus()
{
    param([parameter(mandatory=$true)]$vm)
    write-host "Function getVMPowerStatus:Getting Power state for VM $vm" -ForegroundColor DarkYellow$VMstate = (get-vm $vm).PowerState
    write-host "> Power state of $vm : is $VMstate"
    if($VMState -ne $ExpectedPowerStatus)
    {
        return $false
    }
}

function PowerOffVM()
{
    param([parameter(mandatory=$true)]$vm)
    write-host "Function PowerOffVM:Terminating VM $vm" -ForegroundColor DarkYellow
    try
    {
        stop-vm $vm -confirm:$false -ErrorAction stop
        write-host "> turned off successfully" -ForegroundColor Greenreturn $true
    }
    catch
    {
        write-host "> Failed to turn off VM" -ForegroundColor Red
    }
}

function DeleteVM()
{
    param([parameter(mandatory=$true)]$vm)
    write-host "Function DeleteVM:Preparing to delete VM $vm" -ForegroundColor DarkYellow
    $IsPoweredOff=getVMPowerStatus($vm)
    if($IsPoweredOff -ne $True)
    {
        PowerOffVM $vm
    }
    try
    {
        get-vm -Name $vm | Remove-VM -DeletePermanently -confirm:$false -ErrorAction stop
        write-host "> VM deleted successfully" -ForegroundColor Green
    }catch
    {
        write-host "> VM deletion failed" -ForegroundColor Red
    }
}

function Main()
{
    $VMtoDelete = @(get-vm $VMName)
    foreach($vm in $VMtoDelete){DeleteVM -vm $vm}
}

Main

From your powercli console, if not already done, connect to your vCenter/ESX and run the script