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

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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

Retrieving detailed per-VM space utilization on VSAN

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I was recently helping out my friend Paudie O'Riordan with a request from a customer who was looking for a way to collect detailed space utilization for their VMs (VM Home, VMDK & swap) running on VSAN. Today, this level of granularity is not available in the vSphere UI and the customer was interested in both the used and reserved capacity on a per-VM basis. Luckily, this information can be retrieved using the VSAN Management API.

To do so, we just need to use the VsanQueryObjectIdentities() API method, which I have used in the past to retrieve things like "thick" provisioned VM and translating VSAN Object IDs to their friendly VM display name. To retrieve space utilization information, we just need to set the includeSpaceSummary property to be true. While developing the PowerCLI sample script, I found that this specific property is currently not supported when querying vCenter Server and to retrieve this information, you must go directly to each ESXi host within the VSAN Cluster. I have already filed a feature request and it looks like this will be fixed in a future vSphere release.

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Quick Tip – How do I tell if NSX-V or NSX-T is installed?

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This question came up last week asking for a programmatic method to identify whether NSX-V or NSX-T is deployed in your environment. With NSX-V, vCenter Server is a requirement but for NSX-T, vCenter Server is not a requirement, especially for multi-hypervisor support. In this post, I will assume for NSX-T deployments, you have configured a vCenter Compute Manager.

Both NSX-V and NSX-T uses the ExtensionManager API to register themselves with vCenter Server and we can leverage this interface to easily tell if either solutions are installed. NSX-V uses the com.vmware.vShieldManager string to identify itself and NSX-T uses the com.vmware.nsx.management.nsxt string to identify itself.

Here is a quick PowerCLI snippet that demonstrates the use of the vSphere API to check whether NSX-V or NSX-T is installed and provides the version shown in the registration:

Here is a screenshot from my environment which has both NSX-V (6.4) and NSX-T (2.1) installed:


Note: Due to some current testing, I have not upgraded my NSX-T deployment to the latest 2.2 release, so I do not know if the version gets bumped to match the actual released version

vGhetto Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

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While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS:

How do you “log a reason” using PowerCLI when rebooting or shutting down ESXi host?

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I am sure many of you have seen this UI prompt asking you to specify a reason before issuing a reboot or shutdown of an ESXi host and I assume most of you spend a few seconds to type in a useful message and not just random characters, right? 😉


Have you ever tried performing the same reboot or shutdown operation using the vSphere API or PowerCLI (which leverages the API)? Have noticed, there is not a way to specify a message like you can in the UI?

Here is a table of the PowerCLI cmdlets and the respective vSphere API that is used to perform these two operations:

Operation Cmdlet vSphere API
Reboot  Restart-VMHost  RebootHost_Task
Shutdown  Stop-VMHost  ShutdownHost_Task

When looking at either the PowerCLI and/or vSphere API documentation, we can confirm that there are no fields to specify a message which can lead to an assumption that this is simply not possible or that the functionality might be provided by a private API. Fortunately, this is not the case and the functionality is in fact in the public vSphere API and has been for quite some time.

When you specify a message prior to rebooting or shutting down, this message is actually persisted and implemented as an Event within vCenter Server as shown in the screenshot below.

Instead of being able to specify a message that is only applicable to an ESXi host, I believe the original vSphere API designers thought that this functionality could also be useful and applied more broadly across any number of the vSphere Inventory objects, not just ESXi hosts. As such, this functionality which the vSphere UI uses is provided by the LogUserEvent() method which is part of the EventManager API. Customers or solutions can leverage this mechanism to log custom user defined events which is then persisted with the lifecycle fo the vSphere Inventory Object or as far back as your retention period for vCenter Server Events.

Going back to our original question, if you want to specify a message prior to rebooting or shutting down an ESXi host, the following snippet below demonstrates the use of the vSphere API via PowerCLI:

Converting a vSphere Content Library from Subscriber to a Publisher?

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This is a blog post on some old Content Library research which I had looked into several months back for a customer inquiry and realized I never got a chance to write about. When you create a Subscriber Content Library (CL) which synchronize content from a Published CL, the Subscriber CL is basically in read-only mode. Not only can you not edit or modify the content, but the CL itself is also locked as a Subscriber forever. Why might this be a concern or an issue?

Consider the following scenario, where you have a single master CL that contains all the images you wish to distribute amongst your remote sites as efficiently as possible and ideally leveraging CL's built-in replication mechanism. Lets say the master CL is in Palo Alto and you have several vCenter Servers that can be configured as Subscriber CLs in Cork, Ireland. Instead of having configuring each Subscriber to pull remotely from PA, why not replicate that to a single Subscriber located in Ireland and re-publish that content locally to the remainder CL? The ideal workflow would look something like the diagram below.

However, today you can not simply convert a Subscriber CL to also become a Publisher CL. The only option that I could think of without relying on something like externally replicating a CL is to create an additional Published CL from the Subscriber CL. The idea is you would clone from your Subscriber CL in the same vCenter Server to a new Publisher CL and then that CL can then be used by the other local Subscriber CL as depicted in the diagram below.

This functionality currently does not exist in the vSphere Web/Flex Client, however it can be automated using the Content Library REST APIs. I had created a Content Library PowerCLI Module a few months back and one of the functions that would be useful for this workflow is the Copy-ContentLibrary.

The function is pretty straight forward to use, it accepts the name of a source CL that has already been configured as a Subscriber CL and the name of a new Published CL that you have created but is empty.


After that, the contents of the source CL will be copied into the destination CL as shown in the screenshot below.


Depending on the size of your CL, this can take some time but once it has completed, you should that your Published CL is now populated with content from your source CL.

The PowerCLI function also does a few additional things such as checking if a file already exists and will skip the file and move on to help with the copy.


If your intention is to only replicate from your master CL and then create a local publisher CL, there is an additional flag that you can set to $true called -DeleteSourceFile which will delete the files from the Subscriber CL. This is useful if you only have a single Datastore in which both the Subscriber and Publisher CL is storing, which means after the CL copy, you would be consuming 2x the storage as everything has been duplicated. For this particular customer, they only required an initial sync to populate content in their EMEA office and after that, they would be managing it local and not require additional replications from their master CL.