#LFMF VMware datastores are case sensitive!

Working in a Microsoft world with only brief forays into Unix and Apple server technologies, I tend to forget some lessons from those alternatives :-)

So, today when working on some PowerShell scripts to copy datastore folders around for backup purposes I was a bit stumped by a copy failing as no object was found. The essential components of the script are:

Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core

Connect-VIServer -Server FQDN of server or vCentre -Protocol https
$datastore = Get-Datastore Test
New-PSDrive -Location $datastore -Name TT -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root '\'
Copy-DatastoreItem 'TT:\sage\*' 'J:\esx\test\sage'
start-vm -vm 'Sage'

The Add-PSSnapin puts the VMware supplied PowerCLI snapins in place to manage ESX/vCentre architecture
Connect-VIServer does what it says on the tin
New-PSDrive creates a PowerShell drive mapping to the datastore in question so that it can be maipulated., and the Copy-DatastoreItem with those parameters copies the entire folder over (you can recurse through folders and so on if you wish, this is a simple copy)


Can you see the mistake, no I couldn't either!

The script would fail on the copy-datastoreitem command and jump onto the start-vm. Now I know there should be error handling and all that stuff, but this was a quick 1-off to sort something out.

So I browsed teh data store through the vCentre interface, all was there, the target folders were there...

In the end the Unix issue of capitalisation rang a distant echo. The Sage folder on the datastore was precisely that "Sage" not "sage".

Quick edit, and all is running.

Phew!

'scuse the inappropriate word wraps in the code.