William Lam

VSAN Managed Object Browser (MOB) in vSphere 6.7 & vSphere 6.7 Update 1

09/10/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

If you have ever spent any time using the vSphere API, you probably have heard of or have used the vSphere Managed Objected Browser (MOB) which is an extremely useful learning and debugging tool when working with the vSphere API. The vSphere MOB is accessed through a web browser connecting to either vCenter Server or ESXi and provides a graphical interface, allowing you to discovery/explore the underlying vSphere API and its data in a very intuitive manner.

As an avid user of the VSAN Management API since its release, I have always wanted something similar, especially when I first got started. I was quite happy when I found out in vSphere 6.7 and VSAN 6.7, the VSAN team has added a VSAN MOB interface directly on ESXi, for the VSAN specific APIs that are available only on an ESXi host. Just like the vSphere MOB which is also available on ESXi host, it is disabled by default and must be enabled.

The following ESXCLI commands can be used to enable/disable the VSAN MOB on ESXi 6.7:

esxcli vsan debug mob start
esxcli vsan debug mob stop

However, when I tried to enable the VSAN MOB, I ran into the following error message:

hostname 'localhost.localdomain' doesn't match '192.168.30.10'

It turns out there is an issue where it fails to match the IP Address of the ESXi host to the default localhost.localdomain and hence it fails to start the VSAN MOB. This issue is fixed in the upcoming vSphere & VSAN 6.7 Update 1, but in the mean time, there is a workaround.

Using VMC API to answer commonly asked questions about your SDDC

09/06/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

In the past month or so since joining the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) team, I have seen a number of inquiries from our Customer Success team, partners and customers on how to retrieve certain pieces information about their deployed SDDC, usually for information or integration purposes. Some of these questions can simply be answered by using the VMC Console UI, however there are others that is only available when using the VMC API, which provides a ton more data than what the UI could ever display. In any case, I figure it would be useful to share some of this information, especially as it pertains to the VMC API.

Below are just some of the frequently asked questions that I have seen and they can all be answered simply performing a GET /api/orgs/<orgId>/sddcs/<sddcId> on your specific SDDC via VMC API. In addition, I have also create two sample scripts which exercises these VMC APIs, one using the native VMC REST API and another with PowerCLI using the VMC cmdlet, which you can find more details below.

1) What version is my SDDC running?

This can be found in the VMC Console UI under the "Support" tab for a given SDDC.

You can also find this information using the VMC API by referring to the resource_config.sddc_manifest.vmc_version property.

2) When was my SDDC created?

This can be found in the VMC Console UI under the "Support" tab for a given SDDC.

You can also find this information using the VMC API by referring to the created property.

3) How long do I have until my 1-Node SDDC expires?

This can be found in the VMC Console UI under the SDDC card summary view or detailed view.

You can also find this information using the VMC API by referring to the expiration_date property. This property will be null if your SDDC is NOT a 1-Node, which is the only configuration which has an expiration.

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 US Sessions

08/31/2018 by William Lam 12 Comments

It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most, if not all VMworld 2018 US session recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 585 sessions with 570 published with recordings. I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

UPDATE 1 (09/01/18) - It looks after publishing the streaming URLs, folks found that it included a direct download link to the .MP4 file. Thanks to Jorge de la Cruz from the community who was able to extract this from my original github repo. I have gone ahead and also updated my repo to include both the streaming and download URL for folks who just want to download individual sessions. There are a number of ways to "Automate" the download including using wget or Invoke-Webrequest.

UPDATE 2 (09/03/18) - If you try to download the files without going through my github repo (browser or through automation), you may noticed you get a 404 error message. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4 -O VIN2527BU.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "http://www.vmware.com"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile VIN2527BU.mp4

In addition, I have also published us.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.

Quick Tip – Requirements for using Guest Operation APIs (Invoke-VMScript & Copy-VMGuestFile) in VMC

08/02/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Since this question came up again today, I figure it was worth sharing in case others also had trouble using the vSphere Guest Operations API in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), which includes PowerCLI's Invoke-VMScript and Copy-VMGuestFile cmdlet. There are a couple of requirements that you must satisfy both in the GuestOS as well as between your on-prem vSphere environment and VMC.

VMware Tools installed and running, it may seem obvious, but I have had customers trying to use various scripts without realizing this was a requirement. You should also ensure that you are running the latest version of VMware Tools, especially as there bugfixes that may impact Guest Operations APIs.
VPN or Direct Connect (DX) configured between your on-prem vSphere environment and VMC, this is required as you will need access to ESXi hosts which is only available through a VPN or DX
Create a VMC firewall rule to allow access from your on-prem network to VMC's ESXi hosts on port 443 which is used for Guest Operations access including transferring files to and from the GuestOS

The VMC firewall rule is usually the thing that most folks forget about and this simply because for most on-prem environment, access to ESXi over 443 is just sort of a default.

Once you have configured the VMC firewall to allow 443 to ESXi hosts, you will be able to use the Guest Operations API including Invoke-VMScript and Copy-VMGuestFile to a VM running in VMC

Creating a vSphere Content Library directly on Amazon S3

07/26/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

A few years back I had blogged about creating your own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library enabling customers to take advantage of different types of storage backing than just vSphere Datastores. The primary requirement was that the content endpoint was accessible over HTTP(s), which meant that a number of solutions could be used from a simple web server like Nginx to an advanced distributed object store like Amazon S3 for example.

The workflow to create a 3rd Party vSphere Content Library on S3 is fairly straight forward, here is high level summary:

Organize the content on a local system (desktop)
Run a python script to index and generate the Content Library metadata
Upload the Content Library to S3

A disadvantage of the above solution is that each time you need to update or remove content, the entire process would have to be repeated again, including re-uploading the changes. Not only was this time consuming from an operational standpoint but now you also needed to also keep a full copy of all the content locally which can be several hundred gigabytes, if not more.

This topic was recently brought back up again by Gilles Chekroun, an SE in our Networking and Security Business Unit who reached out to see if there was a solution to help his customer who was running into this challenge. Over the last couple of weeks, I had been working with both Gilles and Eric Cao (Content Library Engineer) on how we could enhance the existing Python script which indexes and generates the Content Library metadata to also support running directly on Amazon S3 bucket.