Get Vm Template Uuid

Get VM Template UUID for Use with Terraform

I was creating a terraform file that clones a template. The VMWare Provider from Terraform requires the UUID of the template. This info, unfortunately isn’t easy to find.

I settled on using powerCLI. After logging in it is fairly easy to list the VMs and Templates.

Using the get-view module you can see some of the details of the template.

Seeing that there is more nested data in the ‘VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigInfo’ section I was struggling to figure out how to dig into that data to find if the UUID was even available.

I normally view pretty much anything older than 5ish years too old to be relevant, but that bit me this time. Surprisingly enough, it was a post in the VMWare communities forums from 2008 that gave what was needed. https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-PowerCLI-Discussions/How-to-get-the-VM-UUID/td-p/1045158

While this was for the detail from a VM, it works equally as well for a template.

I was able to use this to incrementally dig into the various objects to find the UUID.

If you want the single command that gives the UUID directly: