PowerShell snippet: “start a virtual machine and wait for a bit”

Over the last year there are a couple of PowerShell functions that have become a common set of many of my scripts.  One example is this “StartVMAndWait” function:

 function StartVMAndWait($vmToStart){
 start-vm $vmToStart
 do {Start-Sleep -milliseconds 100} 
     until ((Get-VMIntegrationService $vmToStart | ?{$_.name -eq "Heartbeat"}).PrimaryStatusDescription -eq "OK")
 }

This is a simple function that starts a virtual machine and then waits until the heartbeat integration component has returned a healthy status.  This is a good indicator that the guest operating system has completed booting – which makes this quite handy when you want to start a virtual machine and then interact with the guest operating system in some way.

Cheers,

Ben

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2013
  HI. I suggest adding also a timeout, for cases that the VM failes to start or something else fails, otherwise it might loop forever. Yizhar

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2013
  Although a failout might be good to, as a "bad" client would hang indefinitely.

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2013
  Good point.  I will see if I can update this to include that.

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2014
  Hello, Another point of improvement would be support for virtual machines in Azure.