Its fairly easy to see how long a VM has been running – but how do you know the Hyper-V VM start time?
In Hyper-V the VM uptime is easy to find
PS> Get-VM | where State -eq 'Running' Name State CPUUsage(%) MemoryAssigned(M) Uptime Status Version ---- ----- ----------- ----------------- ------ ------ ------- W16AS01 Running 6 1246 00:12:18.6480000 Operating normally 8.0 W16CN01 Running 0 538 00:09:18.2180000 Operating normally 8.2 W16DC01 Running 0 940 00:15:19.1550000 Operating normally 8.0 W17035CN01 Running 0 540 00:06:17.7980000 Operating normally 8.2 W1709CN01 Running 0 512 00:03:15.8540000 Operating normally 8.2
Sometimes you might want to know when the VM was started
The Uptime property is a TimeSpan so you can calculate the start time
PS> $now = Get-Date
PS> Get-VM | where State -eq 'Running' | select Name, @{N='StartTime'; E={$now - $_.Uptime}}
Name StartTime
---- ---------
W16AS01 02/12/2017 10:23:15
W16CN01 02/12/2017 10:26:16
W16DC01 02/12/2017 10:20:15
W17035CN01 02/12/2017 10:29:16
W1709CN01 02/12/2017 10:32:18
Once you’ve added the calculated property you can use like any other property
PS> Get-VM | where State -eq 'Running' | select Name, @{N='StartTime'; E={$now - $_.Uptime}} | sort StartTime
Name StartTime
---- ---------
W16DC01 02/12/2017 10:18:46
W16AS01 02/12/2017 10:21:47
W16CN01 02/12/2017 10:24:47
W17035CN01 02/12/2017 10:27:48
W1709CN01 02/12/2017 10:30:50
Using calculated fields like this is a handy technique for changing the way data is displayed.