Filtering Virtual Machines

You can retrieve commonly used information about virtual machines that match specific criteria. You can retrieve information for up to 4000 virtual machines in a single vCenter Server instance.

You can retrieve a list of virtual machines in a single vCenter Server instance by filtering the results based on a specific requirement. For example, you can use as filter criteria the power state of the virtual machines, or the host, cluster, data center, folder, or resource pool that must contain the virtual machines. In case you specify multiple filter criteria, only virtual machines that match all filter criteria are returned.

To retrieve a list of the virtual machines that match your specific criteria, call the list methods of the VM service. The method takes as parameter the VMTypes.FilterSpec instance that you can use to provide your filter criteria.