Exporting list of virtual machines does not list all virtual machines

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• In an environment with more than 100 virtual machines, when exporting a large list of virtual machines to a csv file, you see breaks in the data produced.
• For example, in a csv file, you see data similar to:
  
  NAME,STATE,STATUS,HOST,PROVISIONED SPACE,USED SPACE,HOST CPU - MHZ,HOST MEM - MB,GUEST MEM - %,NOTES,ALARM ACTIONS
  Windows 2003 R2 01,Powered On,Normal,10.21.51.19,22.00 GB,4.38 GB,19,332,0%,,Enabled
  Win 2003 Test,Powered On,Normal,10.21.51.19,22.00 GB,4.38 GB,39,272,1%,,Enabled
  Ubuntu Server,Powered On,Normal,10.21.51.19,11.00 GB,2.23 GB,0,614,1%,,Enabled
  TEST,Powered On,Normal,10.21.51.19,11.00 GB,3.91 GB,119,123,5%,,Enabled
  Win2003-64-VC,Powered On,Normal,10.21.51.19,87.00 GB,86.01 GB,418,4453,11%,,Enabled
  ,,,,,,,,,
  ,,,,,,,,,
  ,,,,,,,,,

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x

Resolution

This is a known issue with the vSphere Client caching data for the Export List and occurs only in large environments.

If you sort the list of virtual machines by name and then perform the export, you see that the virtual machine name is populated, but all other data in the row appear empty.

To work around this issue in the vSphere Client, get all the data exported. To do this, you must scroll (with a mouse scroll wheel) or use the Page Down key through the list of virtual machines, so that the data is cached correctly and then export the data.

Note: This issue is not seen in the vSphere Web Client.