Quick Tip – How to tell if a VMFS datastore is local or not using new vSphere 5.5 API?

I was recently working on a script for a friend that collects some basic information about VMFS based Datastores. While going through the vSphere API 5.5 Reference, I noticed a new property was introduced in vSphere 5.5 API called "local". It looks like we now have a simple way of checking whether a given VMFS Datastore is local or not. In the past, the only semi-reliable method for checking whether a VMFS datastore was local or not was to see if the "multipleHostAccess" property was set to true, which meant it was a shared VMFS. This was not very reliable as it could be a remote VMFS Datastore but only exported to one host so far and the other major caveat is that this property was only available when connecting to a vCenter Server.

To demonstrate this new API property, I have created an example vSphere SDK for Python (pyvmomi) sample called: list_datastore_info.py

Here is a screenshot running the script directly against an ESXi host (you can also connect to vCenter Server as well):

The script also supports a --json|-j output option, here is an example of that:

If you want to be able to format the JSON output in a more friendly manner, you can pipe the string output to python -mjson.tool