I'm trying to retrieve the GuestFamily property from virtual machine guests. No luck from the PowerCLI client on my desktop, but another PowerCLI client (let's call it client2), which happens to be running on a vm server, retrieves this property just fine from the same infrastructure.
$x = get-vm $vmName
$x.guest.guestFamily
$members = $x.guest | gm
$members.count is 20 from my desktop and 24 from client2. The discrepant members are LockUpdates, UnlockUpdates, Client, and GuestFamily.
When I first noticed GuestFamily missing, my desktop was running PowerCLI 5.0 with the vCloud Director component of PowerCLI NOT installed. No change after upgrading PowerCLI, so I uninstalled and reinstalled PowerCLI, this time including the vCloud Director component. Now both clients have VMware vSphere PowerCLI 5.1 Release 1 build 793510. My desktop is in the same domain as Virtual Center, and client2 is in a different domain. Client2 runs 64bit Windows Server 2008R2 with Powershell 3.0. My desktop runs 64bit Windows 7 with Powershell 2.0. Any chance the GuestFamily property requires Powershell 3.0? Or what else am I missing here?