I am continuing to prepare for the VCAP-DCA, a big part of this process is practicing my command line skills.

Today I was using the vMA to practice some list commands and there was one in particular I wanted to share.

You can list the path names to your virtual machines that are registered with the target server (server you are running the commands against).

To do this use:

vmware-cmd -l | more

Your results may look something like:

From there you may notice the 3rd directory in the path to the .vmx file. This is the UUID (universally unique identifier) of the file system on which the virtual machine is residing.

To figure out which UUID belongs to which datastore, use:

esxcli storage filesystem list

Now I can tell which UUID is associated to the “Local01” and “Shared” datastores. Using these two commands, I can tell that “TestVM01” resides on the “Local01” datastore.