Hyper-V PowerShell One-Line-Challenge

  • Article

While digging through my notes I came across an exchange between a colleague and I - where we were challenging each other to come up with the most impressive (and functional) "Hyper-V PowerShell One Liner".  Here is an example of a good one:

Get-Volume | ?{$_.DriveLetter -ne $null} | select @{N='Drive Letter';E={$_.DriveLetter}},@{N='Free Space (GB)';E={"{0:N2}" -f ($_.SizeRemaining / 1GB)}},@{N='Space Used By VHDs (GB)';E={$driveletter = $_.DriveLetter; "{0:N2}" -f ((Get-VMHardDiskDrive * | ? {$_.Path -match "^$driveletter" } | Get-VHD | Measure -sum FileSize | Select -exp sum)/1GB)}}

What does this one liner do?  Well - let's run it and see:

If you pull it apart you can see that what it does is:

  1. Get all disks in the physical computer
  2. List the drive letters of each disk
  3. Report the free space on each disk (formatted to gigabytes)
  4. Finds all virtual hard disks that Hyper-V knows about on each disk and displays how much space they are using (formatted to gigabytes)

Very nice!

Cheers,
Ben