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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 5

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In Part 5, we are now going to have a look at networking section of the VAMI UI.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

In the Networking tab, under the "Manage" sub-tab, you can find details about the system Hostname (PNID), DNS servers as well as the configurations for each network interface (in the case of a VCHA deployment, you would have more than one network interface configured).

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/networking/dns/hostname
  • GET /appliance/networking/dns/servers
  • GET /appliance/networking/interfaces
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/networking/ipv4

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


This sample script only retrieves IPv4 networking information, but you can easily retrieve IPv6 information by calling into the IPv6 VAMI API endpoints which you can refer to the documentation or the API Explorer for more details.

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 4

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In Part 4, we are now going to shift our attention to a very important topic which often gets overlooked and is also usually one of the culprits for many infrastructure issues. What am I referring to? Time Synchronization! You would not believe the number of times that I hear about an issue (not always VMware-related) and after looking into it, the issue was because the user did not have proper time synchronization configured or worse, it was not even running at all. I will agree, it is not always the easiest thing to check for and sometimes there may not even be an API to use, which makes it that much more difficult. Lets see how we can verify our time settings using the new VAMI APIs.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/system/time
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/timesync
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/ntp

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


With this function, not only can you verify that you have NTP configured and it is up and running, but you can also easily get the current system time and compare that with the rest of your other infrastructure to ensure the VCSA/PSC is not time drifting. Historically, to be able to retrieve this information, you normally had to login via SSH and run a couple commands on the Shell and just imagine if you needed to do this across all of your vSphere environments?

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 3

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In Part 3, we are going to look at auditing the different ways you can access the VCSA which includes direct console access (TTY1), Direct-Console UI (TTY2), whether the Bash Shell is enabled and remote SSH access. This is especially useful if you need to ensure certain interfaces like SSH is always disabled and you can even create scheduled task that would periodically run the PowerCLI script and generate either an email or some other notification when a particular access interface is enabled when it is not supposed to be.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

We will be retrieving the two access configurations properties shown in the VAMI UI today as well as two additional properties that are not displayed.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/access/consoleui
  • GET /appliance/access/dcui
  • GET /appliance/access/shell
  • GET /appliance/access/ssh

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


The output is fairly straight forward, just boolean specifying whether each of the access types are either enabled or disabled. To make changes to any of these settings, you just need to use the PUT operation against the specific access endpoint that you wish to enable or disable. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 2

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In Part 2 of this series, we take a look at how to monitor the health of your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) by retrieving some of the health metrics that are exposed by the Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI).

VAMI UI Area of Focus

Regardless if you have an Embedded VCSA, External PSC or External VCSA node, there are four basic health metrics that are shown in the VAMI UI today: overall health of the system, CPU, memory and the last time the health check was performed. If you are running an Embedded VCSA or External VCSA, there is an additional health metric for the vCenter Server Database (VCDB) as shown in the screenshot below. Interestingly, while going through the health APIs, I also found a few more metrics that are currently not displayed in the VAMI UI today. These additional metrics include Swap, Storage and Software packages which can also be useful to monitor, especially on the storage front.

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 1

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One of the most most exciting developments in vSphere 6.5 with respect to Automation is the introduction of several new REST APIs included in the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). In addition to covering some of the existing capabilities like vSphere Content Library and Tagging, customers will now have access to a new basic Virtual Machine management API that has been greatly simplified compared to the traditional vSphere SOAP API and access to the VCSA's Virtual Appliance Management Interface API, also known to most as the VAMI.

I am particular excited about the VAMI REST API as this is where customers will be able to manage the entire full lifecycle of their VCSA/PSC which will eventually include all Day 2 operations as well as Install, Upgrade, Migrate and Recovery capabilities. This initial release of the VAMI REST API covers most of the functionality found in the current VAMI UI by going to https://[VCSA]:5480 after your VCSA or PSC has been deployed.

Not having spent a whole lot of time with the new VAMI REST API, I figured a good way for me to learn more about the APIs was to consume it and what better way than using PowerCLI? With PowerCLI 6.5 R1 (Windows version) release, there is a new Connect-CisServer and Get-CisService cmdlet that provides you access to these new REST APIs including the VAMI APIs. As I explore the new VAMI APIs, I plan to create a new VAMI PowerCLI Module that contains functions exerising some of the new APIs that you see today in the VAMI UI.

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Automated deployment and setup of vRealize Network Insight (vRNI)

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Earlier last week I had deployed the latest version of vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) 3.2 in my home lab to learn more about the product and its capabilities. The vRNI setup involves involves deploying two Virtual Machines, the first being the main vRNI Platform OVA. Once the vRNI Platform VM has been deployed, you will need to activate it with a license key and then generate a shared secret which is then used to deploy the vRNI Proxy OVA. Using the share secret, the vRNI Platform VM will be able to automatically detect when the vRNI Proxy VM is on the network and associate it with the deployment.

The workflow is pretty straight forward but as many of you know me, if I need to manually do something once, it means I should probably automate it for the future 🙂 I had looked around the documentation and did not see any published APIs for the initial setup and configuration. Although a CLI exists, it was only available post-deployment and it required SSH which I did not want to have to rely upon. I ended up reverse engineering the UI to replicate the workflow from an automation standpoint. I created a small PowerCLI script called vRNI-Deploy.ps1 and below are the instructions on using the script.

Step 0 - Obtain a vRNI License Key, which is required to setup vRNI. You may need to work with your VMware Account team or contact VMware Sales to get an evaluation license key.

Step 1 - Download both the vRNI 3.2 Platform and Proxy OVA from here.

Step 2 - Download the vRNI-Deploy.ps1 script to a system that has the latest release of PowerCLI 6.5 R1 installed.

Step 3 - Edit the following sections of the script which you can find more details below:

The full path to both the vRNI Platform and Proxy OVAs:

$vRNIPlatformOVA
$vRNIProxyOVA

The vRNI License Key:

$vRNILicenseKey

The configuration of the vRNI Platform VM:

$vRNIPlatformVMName
$vRNIPlatformIPAddress
$vRNIPlatformNetmask
$vRNIPlatformGateway

The configuration of the vRNI Proxy VM:

$vRNIProxyVMName
$vRNIProxyIPAddress
$vRNIProxyNetmask
$vRNIProxyGateway

General deployment configuration for both VMs:

$DeploymentSize
$DNS
$DNSDomain
$NTPServer
$VMCluster
$VMDatastore
$VMNetwork

Note: The medium (smallest) deployment requires at least 42GB of memory (32GB reserved for Platform VM and 10GB reserved for the Proxy VM). Please ensure you have sufficient resources before deploying into your environment.

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