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New vSAN Management 6.6 API / SDKs / CLIs

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With all the new awesome capabilities that have been introduced in vSAN 6.6, there is just as much Automation goodness that will be available for our customers to consume to help them easily mange and operate at scale.

vSAN Management 6.6 API

Below are all the new Managed Objects that have been introduced in the new vSAN Management 6.6 API. This does not even cover all the new methods or object types. For the complete list of vSAN 6.6 APIs, be sure to check out the vSAN Management 6.6 API Reference Guide here.

  • VsanVcsaDeployerSystem – Virtual Center Service Appliance deployment APIs onto vSAN datastore, operating at both vCenter Server and ESXi Host sides
  • VsanVdsSystem – vSAN system optimized VDS related operations, especially migrations from VSS to VDS
  • VsanUpdateManager – VIB installation engine operating at vSAN cluster level (optimized for vSAN clusters)
  • VsanCapabilitySystem – APIs to query vSAN capability, available on both vCenter and ESXi
  • VsanMassCollector – vSAN system management query API's to access data and managed object properties, operating at a vSAN Cluster level in vCenter Server only
  • VsanPhoneHomeSystem – vSAN online health related query API, operating at a vSAN Cluster level in vCenter Server only

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List of VMware CLIs, SDKs & DevOps Tools

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A frequent question that I get asked from customers and new developers that are looking to get started with VMware Automation is what CLIs (command-line interfaces) or SDKs (programing/scripting specific languages) are available for them to use? I know it is not always easy to find out what is available on the VMware.com website and some times I even have trouble browsing for all the right information as it is located in many different places. I figure it would be helpful not only for myself but also for others if I put together a list of the various VMware CLIs, SDKs and even some of the new DevOps Tools that VMware has been working on that are available to our customers/developers and partners. I have also included a couple of community tools that I think are pretty interesting. If there are others that you think I should add to the list, feel free and leave a comment.

Note: This is by no means a comprehensive list of every single VMware product/toolkit as there are many many more, including gated SDKs specifically for our partner eco-system. For more details on those API/SDKs, be sure to check out the VMware Developer Center.

UPDATE (4/20) - VMware now has an Open Source page on Github http://vmware.github.io/

VMware Cloud Native Apps:

VMware DevOps Tools:

vCloud Air:

vCloud Director:

vSphere:

vRealize Management Suite:

VMware Community Tools:

Early Xmas gift from VMware – pyVmomi (vSphere SDK for Python)

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For vSphere customers and partners who use the Python programming/scripting language, Christmas may have just arrived early. I just found today, VMware has published an initial release of their vSphere SDK for Python called pyVmomi on Github this past weekend. A Python-based SDK has always been a very popular feature request among customers and partners that I have spoken with in the past. It looks like VMware Engineering has heard you loud and clear and have been working hard to get this released.

pyVmomi Github Repository:
https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi

pyVmomi Pypi package:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyvmomi

One of the nice things about releasing pyVmomi on Github versus trying to package it with a particular vSphere release is that the larger VMware community can contribute to the project as well as more frequent updates from VMware. This has also been quite successful for another popular VMware SDK called rbvmomi (vSphere SDK for Ruby) which is seeing a huge uptick with RVC (Ruby vSphere Console) which is built on top of rbvmomi and is a great tool for managing and troubleshooting VMware VSAN.

In this first release, you will notice there is a limited amount documentation and samples exercising the various capabilities of vSphere and you will see further enhancements in these areas with future updates. If there are specific things you would like to see or samples that you think would be useful to have or that you have built, feel free to file an issue or send pull requests to the pyVmomi Github.

If you wish to quickly get started, you can install pyVmomi using a variety of methods including pip, easy_install and pypi package. Below are the steps I took to install pyVmomi on my Mac OS X system using pip and git.

Step 1 - Install pyVmomi using pip by running the following command:

sudo pip install pyvmomi

Step 2 - Clone the pyVmomi Github repo to your system using Git by running the following command:

git clone https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi.git

After the above command, you will have a folder called pyVmomi which contains the source code as well as the two sample scripts. You can contribute back if you create additional samples or enhancements to pyVmomi by simply sending a pull requests.

Try the getallvms.py sample run the following command:

python sample/getallvms.py --host mini.primp-industries.com --password [PASS]

To try the poweronvm.py sample run the following command:

python sample/poweronvm.py --host mini.primp-industries.com --password [PASS] --vmname [VM]

Hopefully we will see many more samples from VMware as well as from our customers who will be using the new SDK. If there is anything that is missing or things you would like to see, feel free to file an issue on pyVmomi Github repository.

Check out the new and improved VMware Developer Center!

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One common piece of feedback that we have heard from customers and partners over the years is how difficult it can be to get started with using VMware's API and SDKs. The biggest challenge is not actually using the API and SDKs, but actually finding out what is available for a particular product or the solution you are trying to develop. The other challenge of course is where to download the API/SDK, language support and their corresponding documentation.

In the past, this information would be scoured throughout VMware's website and Google searches will usually lead folks to the VMware Developer Center. The site has been in need of a major revamp for awhile now and I am glad to see that VMware has taken this feedback very seriously as I have provided similar feedback when I was a customer as well as employee.

I am happy see that we have re-launched the VMware Developer Center which now contains a wealth of useful information that has never been available before! I was one of the lucky few who received early access to the new VMware Developer Center to help provide feedback on how we can better improve our user experience with the site. This will continue to be a work in progress based on on-going feedback from customers and partners.

Here are a few things worth checking out ...

Development & Certification

The first thing I think everyone will just LOVE is that VMware is now listing EVERY single API/SDK that is available which includes public API/SDKs as well as what is known as "Gated API/SDK" that usually are available to partners only. The reason this is a big deal is if you are a new partner, how do you know what is available to you and how can you add value on top of the VMware eco-system? You now can get a list of all VMware API/SDKs under the Developement & Certification section and it provides you with a high level of what each API/SDKs provides. For gated API/SDK, you will see a tiny lock symbol next to it. When you login to MyVMware and you are supposed to have access to these API/SDKs, the icons will be unlocked and you will be able to get more details including downloads and documentation. You can also filter the views by specific API/SDKs as well as scripting/programming language.

vCloud Suite Library

Earlier I mentioned that it was quite difficult for someone to figure out exactly what API/SDKs are available for a particular product, especially within the vCloud Suite. One really neat feature is under the "Library" section which provides you with a high level diagram of the VMware vCloud Suite and it is an interactive diagram which you can hover over and it provides information about each product. If you click on one of the products, it will provide more information on the API/SDKs that can be used to integrate or access that particular product. This is a great way to learn about VMware products from a scripting/programmatic perspective and we also have one for the Horizon Suite.

VMware Standards

One other cool page to visit is the "Standards" page which currently just contains the UX design standards for the vSphere Web Client. If you want to learn more about the design principles used to create the vSphere Web Client or looking to build your own vSphere Web Client plugin, you may be interested in this section. I suspect over time we will be publishing more design standards that can be shared with the general community and hopefully useful for our partners and integrators.

Be sure to explore the rest of the site, though this is only the initial release of the VMware Developer Center, if you have any feedback feel free to leave a comment either on my blog or in the VMTN community forums. I know the team responsible for the VMware Developer Center has so much more planned including more sample code for each of our API/SDK as well as more content and interactions from each of the engineering teams. So stay tuned and check back often!

Creating Custom vSphere Reports is a Breeze with CloudPhysics

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Creating reports is a common task that every vSphere administrator must deal with at least once if not many more times in their career. Whether you are tasked to provide an inventory report of all your virtual machines and their configurations to your manager or to provide a compliance report for your security team to ensure that all virtual machines are hardened according to the vSphere Security Hardening Guide, report creations can be a challenge.

The vSphere platform provides a very powerful and rich set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) that can be consumed by both vSphere administrators as well as developers. However, there is a high learning curve when using the API and it takes quite a bit of time to learn and of course your manager is expecting the report to be done in the next 5 minutes. Even with abstraction tools such as PowerCLI, quickly building a robust, scalable and performant script is not always a trivial task, not to mention the maintenance and updates to the script because your manager wants to continually add more things to the report.

So how can we make reporting so easy that vSphere administrators will no longer have to spend time digging through API documentation and instead they will be able to quickly put together reports within minutes? Well, this is something that the CloudPhysics team has been working on as part of their CloudPhysics card platform and they have built a very unique card solution to help solve this problem. I had the opportunity to get an early preview of this new card and I have to say that I am very impressed at how easy and intuitive the interface is to build simple to very complex reports using this new card solution. The coolest part of this solution is that no programming or scripting skills are required!

To give you an example on how easy it is to use the interface, I recently helped a customer with a script to identify all virtual machines that had a virtual disk using the 2gbsparse disk format. I would like to think I know the vSphere API pretty well, so putting the script together took just a few minutes because I knew exactly where to look for this information. That evening I decided to go through the same scenario, but using the new CloudPhysics card solution and I was literally able to create the report in seconds! It probably took me longer to name the report than to actually create it. As you can see, I am pretty excited about the new card solution and it will be interesting to see all the cool new reports customers can now create and share with each other.

Here is a sneak peak at what the interface looks like when creating your own custom reports:

Here is the final report that is produced:

As you can see, I have quickly narrowed down the specific virtual machine that contains a 2gbsparse VMDK and I am able to see exactly which virtual disk that is. 

If you would like to learn more about the new card solution, Irfan Ahmad, CTO of CloudPhysics will be hosting a live webinar to go over this new solution next Tuesday, June 25th at 9am PST and I would highly recommend you register for it to learn more.

Below is a bit more details on what you can expect from the webinar and you can register here.

vSphere Analytics Without Writing Code: The Quest for Missing Reports

While vSphere, the best-of-class virtualization platform, brings great efficiencies to the datacenter, reporting still presents challenges and pain to sys admins on a daily basis. CloudPhysics offers a radical new way to complete reporting for your virtual infrastructure. In addition to 20 high-impact reports, you can easily build your own and share the report template and output. When asked for asset reports, trending, activity, auditing and more, you’re never more than a few clicks away from delivery.
  
In addition to best practices and secrets to amazing mashups, you’ll learn to:
  • Create easy, visual reports for your vSphere environment
  • Add multiple vCenters in one view
  • Automate the report generation

How To Run The SilverLining Fling Without Installing It In vCloud Director

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A few weeks back the VMware Lab's team released a cool new fling called SilverLining which allows users to build a simplified user-interface for vCloud Director. This interface can be run from any modern web-browser that supports HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. To access the SilverLining interface, you must first install it on a vCloud Director 5.1 Cell.

From a development or proof of concept perspective, it would be really nice to be able to run SilverLining locally from your desktop and point it to a valid vCloud Director 5.1 instance for testing. Well, this is exactly what Andrea Siviero, a Consulting Architect for VMware discovered while playing around with the SilverLining Fling.

UPDATE: 2/28 - For Safari, you can use open /Applications/Safari.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Disclaimer: The solution described here is specifically for Chrome running on Mac OS X or Windows. I have not looked into equivalent settings for other browsers.

Here are the steps required to make this work:

Step 1 - Download SilverLining and extract the contents to your local desktop

Step 2 - Under Silverlining->js directory, there is a file called main.js that needs to be modified. Add the following right under "$(document).ready(function() {" which should point to the base URL of your vCloud Director instance:

localStorage.server = "https://vcd.primp-industries.com";

Step 3 - Launch Chrome with the additional argument via the command-line and load the index.html in the SilverLining directory:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Note: For Windows version of Chrome just pass in the following either via command-line or shortcut to Chrome.exe -disable-web-security

If everything was successful, you should be able to login to the vCloud Organization of your choice and see all the vApps and Catalogs you have access to!

If you receive the "You are attempting to connect to a system no longer supported" shown in the screenshot below:

You may be pointing to a vCloud Director instance that is using a self-signed certificate and you will need to trust the site before proceeding. To do so, open up a new tab and enter the following URL (substituting your vCloud Director URL):

https://vcd.primip-industries.com/api/versions

Click on the "Proceed Anyway" and then reload the index.html page and you should now be able to login to vCloud Director.

I would like to thank Andrea for sharing this awesome tip! Now you can easily develop and test your own custom interface using the Javascript SDK provided by SilverLining all on your desktop. Best of all, you can now point this to any remote vCloud Director 5.1 instance whether that be private or public!