The Inventory Provider is designed to expose an unfiltered inventory view of the inventory items from a server.

It enables navigation and file-style management of the VMware vSphere inventory. By creating a PowerShell drive based on a managed object (such as a data center), you can obtain a view of its contents and the relationships between the items. In addition, you can move, rename, or delete objects by running commands from the PowerShell console.

When you connect to a server with Connect-VIServer, the cmdlet builds two default inventory drives: vi and vis. The vi inventory drive shows the inventory on the last connected server. The vis drive contains the inventory of all vSphere servers connected within the current PowerCLI session.

You can use the default inventory drives or create custom drives based on the default ones.