When using the property collector to access values of a VirtualMachine managed object, there doesn't seem to be a way to query mac addresses without collecting information about all virtual devices. If I add 'config.hardware.device.macAddress' to the path set of the property set, I get an InvalidPropertyFault, but I cannot create a traversal spec to navigate to that position in the hierarchy because none of the elements are managed objects.
I am currently collecting the data by accessing all VirtualDevices on a VirtualMachine using 'config.hardware.device'. I can grab what I want from the output and discard the rest, but I'd rather not have all that data returned in the first place.
Is there some way to query a property of a derived type of a data object without asking for all of the properties of all of values in the base type list?
I'm using VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733.