Importing motion history for virtual machines

Overview

Data providers Inventory of VMware vCenter and Inventory of Microsoft Hyper-V can collect the motion history for imported virtual machines. You can set the period for which the history is collected in the data provider configuration.

The Inventory of Citrix XenServer data provider imports only the current hosts of virtual machines.

Collecting Hyper-V motion history

The Hyper-V data provider uses the standard PowerShell function Microsoft.PowerShell.Diagnostics\Get-WinEvent with filters:

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashTable @{LogName ="Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V*"; StartTime = (Get-Date).AddDays(-100); Id=20419}

This cmdlet collects events that a user can see in the Event Viewer. It gets events from event logs and event tracing log files on local and remote computers.

Collecting VMware motion history

The VMware data provider uses the vim.event.EventHistoryCollector PowerShell class. EventHistoryCollector provides a mechanism for retrieving historical data and updates when the server appends new events.

It collects events that a user can see in the Events tab of the vSphere Web Client.

The following types of events are collected: "VmCreatedEvent", "DrsVmMigratedEvent", "VmMigratedEvent", "VmRelocatedEvent".

Collecting Citrix motion history

Currently the Inventory of Citrix XenServer data provider imports the first collected server as the host for a virtual machine without a home server. All other servers are added to the host history of this virtual machine with the current scan date. With each next scan, new records of servers with the new scan date are added to the host history. If a virtual machine has a home server assigned in Citrix XenServer, this server will be specified as the virtual machine's host. In this case, the host history of this virtual machine will be empty.