Powershell: Shutdown VM and Delete From Disk

This is a fairly simple script but I thought I’d share. I needed to delete a group of about 6 virtual machines this morning. I could easily do this through the vSphere GUI but I figured I’d write a quick script so I could use it for future deletions.

$VMs = (Get-Content servers.txt)

foreach($vm in $VMs){
$active = Get-VM $vm
if($active.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"){
Stop-VM -VM $vm -Confirm:$false
Start-Sleep -Seconds 10
Remove-VM -VM $vm -DeleteFromDisk -Confirm:$false -RunAsync}
else
{Remove-VM -VM $vm -DeleteFromDisk -Confirm:$false -RunAsync}
}

Updated Script:

$VMs = (Get-Content servers.txt)
$vmObj = Get-vm $vms

foreach($active in $vmObj){
if($active.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"){
Stop-VM -VM $active -Confirm:$false -RunAsync | Out-Null} 
}
Start-Sleep -Seconds 7

foreach($delete in $vmObj){
Remove-VM -VM $delete -DeleteFromDisk -Confirm:$false -RunAsync | Out-Null}

This script will run a lot quicker and the code is a bit cleaner.