Time will come when you need a quick inventory of the VMs in your vCenter with their IPs, Computer name, power on status & all these simple things. You might just need that sheet b/c you need to keep an inventory of what you have or just the for the simple cause that the management had asked you for such one. In both cases you need to figure out the quickest and easiest way to do it. Yeah this can be achieved using power shell script or any other scripting language that vSphere support, but let’s keep that to when we require a more extensive inventory that is can not be generated using the GUI of vCenter. One question I repeatedly hear “why is the Export list in vCenter file menu is shadowed and can not be chosen?” Here I will show you the steps to get a simple inventory of your VMs using VMware vCenter GUI & following it will show you how to get the Export list in vCenter file menu in business.

Steps to Export your VM Inventory list from VMware vCenter

1- Open the vSphere Client and connect to your vCenter

2- From the top menu go to View ==> Inventory ==> VMs & Templates

3- From the inventory list on the left side choose the VMs you want to include in your inventory export or choose a top level folder that includes the VMs you want to export

4- Choose the Virtual Machines tab from the the tabs on the top of the right side.

5- You might want to modify the filter to include other items like Virtual machines IPs, Hostname, & the similar.

6- From the top menu go to File => Export => Export list.

7- Choose the format you want to save the list into (CSV, Html, & XML are some of the available format).

Note: You can repeat the above steps for exporting hosts inventory in vCenter and the similar as well!

I hope this help someone save time on generating such inventory list without having to write a single command. For an extra exercise you can try to generate the same with Powershell script and see how much longer it will take you to write such a script :) .