Batch rename of VMs

The other day a consultant came by my desk. He had a problem, the 400 VMs we just move from the customer site in to our datacenter; The backup jobs were failing for most of the VMs.

He had looked into it and it turns out that Symantec Netbackup, which is what is used, is case sensitive and the VM names were all a mix of low, high and low and high cases. So the backup team had to recreate the backup jobs, but before they did that, the consultant asked if it wasn't possible to rename all of the VMs so the names became all lower case.

I thought how hard can that be... As it turns out not very hard and the best part of it. It took less than 20 minutes to rename all 400 VMs, thats three seconds per VM. Now the backup team just had to fix there backup jobs.