Performing Advanced Searches

This topic covers how to use the search page for advanced searches. With advanced searches, you can use the complete filter set, to search for specific items of interest. For example, you can search for such things as:

  • host, cluster, datastore, and software information
  • events (including events that occurred more than 30 days ago, which aren't displayed in the Events tab)
  • information about VMs that includes software, hot fixes, guest operating system details, and services

Use the complete filter set to learn more about your virtualized environment. For example, search for:

  • hosts with low resources
  • datastore capacity issues, such as the amount of free capacity, the number of VMs out of inventory, and search for the last datastore scan
  • VMs based on the datastore on which they reside and the type of datastore
  • VMs based on the host on which they reside
  • events on a specific infrastructure element, such as a host to determine why its speed slowed down and what resource changes took place
  • unexpected events, such as failed datastore scans and guest operating system scans
  • specific VMs with specific software or all instances of software
  • clusters that don't have DRS and HA enabled or are near- or over-capacity based on CPU, memory or storage
  • service requests that haven't been fulfilled within a certain number of days

You have the option of:

Performing advanced searches

Access through:

Tools > Search

Available to:

All Access Rights Levels

To perform advanced searches using the complete filter set:

  1. Select the type of item that you want to search for. Available options are:
    • Clusters
    • Datastores
    • Events
    • Hosts
    • Service Requests
    • Software
    • VMs
    • Virtual Services
  2. Optional: To select where to search, click and select the location from the tree.
  3. Select filters as shown in Searching table information with filters. To learn more about the filters, see Properties Reference.

    Notes:  

    • When you add multiple filters to a search, Commander uses an AND search, not an OR search. For example, if you search for VMs where the Power State is "Running" and the Power State is "Not Running", the search will not return any results because a single VM can't have two power states. To search for two power states (or for any other property that would require an OR search), use two separate searches.
    • Because properties can differ by cloud account type, the values you can specify for a property in search filters may differ from the displayed values for that property. For example, when searching, the Host property Migration has two selectable values: Yes and No. In the search results (as well as in the Details section and lists), the value for this property is displayed as either "VMotion is Enabled/Disabled" (for vCenter) or "Live Migration is Enabled/Disabled" (for SCVMM).

    For VMs, when you select Guest OS Details, you have the choice of selecting Software, Hot Fixes, OS Details or Services and then another set of secondary filters becomes available. The example in the following figure shows Software selected from the list of filters, with contain selected from the search filter drop-down menu and two other secondary filters selected, in this case Name and Install Date. In addition, Power State was selected as the second main filter.

    Note: You can use search criteria to find all software with versions that include whole numbers and sub-versions up to one decimal place. For example, this means that if you attempt to search for software versions that are higher than 1.1 (Version > 1.1), the results don't include version numbers that contain 1.1.1, 1.1.2, and so on.

    Search tab
  4. Click Search.

    The results of your search are displayed under a separate Results tab. You can:

    You can also display different columns to view different types of information. For more information, see Adding, removing, or rearranging table columns.