There is no clear documentation that I can find to get properties for a virtual machine... about rbvmomi

[cdickmann]

Try connection.propertyCollector.collectMultiple(vms, prop1, prop2) or connection.propertyCollector.collectMultiple(vms, *props)

[Altonymous]

tyvm, that's what I needed!

[Altonymous]

@cdickmann While you're around.. am I getting the virtual machines array the most efficient way possible? We have folders nested in folders, so I figured I'd have to traverse them n-levels to find all the machines. Not ideal imo.

[cdickmann]

Check out this example on how to use the property collector to traverse the tree in a single API call and get all objects of a certain type. In the example we walk the tree of resource pools to get all VMs:
https://github.com/vmware/rbvmomi/blob/master/lib/rbvmomi/utils/admission_control.rb#L167

There is also this example that traverses all kinds of stuff and gets all kinds of stuff:
https://github.com/vmware/rbvmomi/blob/master/lib/rbvmomi/utils/perfdump.rb#L79

[pmitoraj]

Just recently I found a convenient way of getting all the nested objects. It was somewhere in https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi code base.
You can use view manager to collect all the nested objects of types that are interesting to you.
Here is a code sample:

params = {:host => '1.1.1.1',
  :insecure => true,
  :user => 'root',
  :password => 'pass'}
client = RbVmomi::VIM.connect(params)

si_content = client.serviceInstance.content
view_manager = si_content.viewManager
virtual_machines = view_manager.CreateContainerView(container: si_content.rootFolder,
                                        type: ['VirtualMachine'],
                                        recursive: true).view

value for type is an array with possible String values: VirtualMachine, Folder, Network, Datastore, ClusterComputeResource, ResourcePool, HostSystem