One of the more powerful features that VMware has added to several product lines lately has been vSphere tags. As time has gone on support for these tags has been added to other products beyond just vSphere vCenter such as vRealize Operations and PowerCLI cmdlets. I still see engineers ask why someone would use tags instead of the older school custom attributes, so I figured I’d show how we use them in my job.

We utilize tags in two specific ways. The first is to use the tags to filter groups of VMs for PowerCLI reporting. In our case we have tags created for each Engineering team so we can customize these reports only for the virtual guests that they have access to.

The second use for these vSphere tags is to filter objects in vRealize Operations for dashboards, policies, alerts, etc. Eventually reports from vRealize Operations may even replace the PowerCLI reports since most of the properties and metrics are already collected from vCenter.