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PowerCLI

How to retrieve the CSP Refresh Token expiry using the CSP API

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I recently had question from a customer who wanted to automate the retrieval of the expiry for a given Cloud Services Platform (CSP) Refresh Token so that they could monitor it programmatically and setup notifications before the token expires. The CSP Refresh Token is required to interact with solutions within CSP including VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC).

Customers can check the current Refresh Token expiry along with the initiate create and last used time by navigating to "My Account" in the CSP UI and under "API Tokens" as shown in the screenshot below.


To retrieve this programmatically using the CSP REST API, you will need to provide a valid Refresh Token and then perform a POST am/api/auth/api-tokens/details

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Instant Clone Microsoft Windows & VM Keystroke VMworld demo and code posted

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Apologies for the delay in getting my VMworld 2018 demo and code posted online, I know a number of you have been asking about the Windows Instant Clone samples to get an idea on how to create your own customization scripts for managing more "recent" Microsoft Windows releases 😉 and perhaps you might even consider submitting a pull request to share with the community. I have posted both the videos and code samples below. Enjoy and happy Automating!

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows

To demonstrate the power of the newly re-architected Instant Clone feature in vSphere 6.7 and to help make the point clear that the Instant Clone feature is really Guest Operating System agnostic, meaning you can Instant Clone any to Virtual Machine that can run VMware Tools, I thought it would be fun to see how old of a Microsoft OS that I could Instant Clone. After a bit of trial/error, that turned out to be Windows 98 and Windows 2000 🙂

Windows 98 Demo


Windows 2000 Demo


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Managing Distributed Firewall Rules in VMC using PowerShell & NSX-T Policy API

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Back in November 2018, VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) SDDC 1.5 Patch 1 was released and it was one of the most highly anticipated release by our customers. Although this was a "patch" release, it included a ton of new features and also brought the full power of the NSX-T platform to VMC as a generally available feature!

With NSX-T, customers also now have access to the highly requested Distributed Firewall (DFW) capability which enables granular control over East-West traffic between application workloads. In addition to enabling micro-segmentation in VMC, customers can now easily manage DFW rules using a number of grouping constructs (Tags, Virtual Machines & Conditional Statements) to create dynamic policies which follow their workloads.


Customers can configure DFW (as well as Edge Firewall) rules using the VMC Console UI but many of you have been asking for an automated method, especially if you need to create a large number of policies for more than a couple of workloads. After returning from the holiday, I spent the last couple of days updating my NSX-T Policy PowerShell Module which now includes basic support for managing DFW. For those of you who are new to using the NSX-T Policy API and PowerCLI, be sure to give these two articles a read here and here before proceeding further.

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Automating Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Manager initial configuration for VMC

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Following up from my previous Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Automation article which looked at deploying the HCX Manager OVA, this article will now focus on automating the initial configuration of HCX Manager including the registration to HCX Cloud which will enable the on-prem HCX Manager to be used with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). Once HCX Manager is up and running, customers can configure the system using the HCX VAMI interface which is available on port 9443 via the UI or in our case with the HCX VAMI APIs. 


I have updated my HCX PowerShell Module to include 8 additional functions that can be used for initial configuration of HCX Manager:

  • Set-HcxVCConfig
  • Set-HcxLicense
  • Get-HcxNSXConfig
  • Set-HcxNSXConfig
  • Get-HcxLocation
  • Set-HcxLocation
  • Get-HcxRoleMapping
  • Set-HcxRoleMapping
  • Get-HcxProxy
  • Set-HcxProxy
  • Remove-HcxProxy

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Is vCenter Server & ESXi hosts using VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) or custom CA certificates?

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Customers have two primary methods of managing TLS certificates for their ESXi hosts, they can either use the built-in VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) which is part of vCenter Server or Custom CA Certificates. I will not go into the gory details, but you can read more about the options here in our documentation.

A question that I had received recently was whether you can determine the type of certificate an ESXi host was provisioned with and whether this could be programmatically retrieved using the vSphere API? The answer is yes. In vSphere 6.0, we introduced a CertificateInfo property which contains a number of fields including status, issuer, expiry and subject details and by inspecting either the issuer or subject property, you can determine the type of certificate on the ESXi host.

Here is a screenshot of the data using the vSphere MOB for an ESXi host that has VMCA-based certificate:


Here is a screenshot of the data using the vSphere MOB for an ESXi host that has custom CA certificate:


As you can see, for VMCA-based certificate the issuer's OU will have value of "VMware Engineering" and subject's emailAddress will have value of "vmca@vmware.com".

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Automating new Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication using Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) API

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Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication is the newest migration type that has been added to the Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) solution, which was also demonstrated during the VMworld US 2018 keynote (watch here). Unlike the traditional Bulk Migration, which also uses vSphere Replication to perform the initial replication, Cloud Motion with VR does not incur any downtime during the VM switch over. This is possible with our most beloved vSphere feature, vMotion!

With Bulk Migration, the VM on the source vCenter Server must be shutdown before the newly replicated VM on the destination vCenter Server can be powered on or else a network conflict will occur. Using Cloud Motion with VR, the VM is simply vMotion'ed from the source vCenter Server to the destination vCenter Server and because the VM's storage has already been replicated, the only thing that needs to transfer is the memory state of the VM.


All three HCX Migration Types can be scheduled from the HCX UI using the vSphere Client or automated using the HCX API. The latter option is definitely ideal for customers with large number of migrations but it can also help with smaller migrations as it reduces the amount of user input required when using the UI and ultimately, this reduces user errors.

To help demonstrate the HCX Migration APIs, I have updated my VMware HCX PowerShell Module to include the following two new functions:

  • New-HcxMigration
  • Get-HcxMigration

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