vSphere API

Automating Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) configuration using vSphere API and PowerCLI

01/24/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

After publishing my recent article on the new the vSphere Health capability which takes advantage of VMware's Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), I had a couple of folks reach out asking how their customers could check whether CEIP is enabled for a given vCenter Server and if not, how to enable it using Automation. For one of these customers, they had over 25+ vCenter Server, so they were not interested in doing this by hand and nor should they.

For those interested in the vSphere UI, the CEIP settings is configured in the Administration menu under the Deployment section as shown in the screenshot below.

We can also manage the CEIP settings programmatically using vSphere API and this is controlled by an Advanced vCenter Server setting called VirtualCenter.DataCollector.ConsentData. The value of this property is actually a JSON payload as you can see in the screenshot below and when updating this property, we need to update both the change version as well as whether we want CEIP enabled or disabled for a given vCenter Server.

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

01/08/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

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

Retrieving detailed per-VM space utilization on VSAN

06/27/2018 by William Lam 4 Comments

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.

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

06/14/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

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:

$extensionManager = Get-View ExtensionManager

foreach ($extension in $extensionManager.ExtensionList) {
    if($extension.key -eq "com.vmware.vShieldManager") {
        Write-Host "NSX-V is installed with version"$extension.Version
    } elseif($extension.key -eq "com.vmware.nsx.management.nsxt") {
        Write-Host "NSX-T is installed with version"$extension.Version
    }
}

$extensionManager = Get-View ExtensionManager

foreach ($extension in $extensionManager.ExtensionList) {

if($extension.key -eq "com.vmware.vShieldManager") {

Write-Host "NSX-V is installed with version"$extension.Version

} elseif($extension.key -eq "com.vmware.nsx.management.nsxt") {

Write-Host "NSX-T is installed with version"$extension.Version

}

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

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

06/04/2018 by William Lam 2 Comments

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:

$eventManager = Get-View eventManager
$vmhost = Get-VMHost -Name 192.168.30.11
$message = "This message will be logged"

$eventManager.LogUserEvent($vmhost.ExtensionData.MoRef,$message)

$eventManager = Get-View eventManager

$vmhost = Get-VMHost -Name 192.168.30.11

$message = "This message will be logged"

$eventManager.LogUserEvent($vmhost.ExtensionData.MoRef,$message)

New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 2

04/30/2018 by William Lam 4 Comments

In the previous article, I provided an overview of the new "Parentless" Instant Clone feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.7 and some of the architectural differences between prior versions of Instant Clone. In this post, I will show you how to use the new Instant Clone feature, which is currently only available with the vSphere API.

There are two important parts when using Instant Clone:

A user defined script which runs within the GuestOS and is responsible for customizing the network identity of the Instant Clone. This script is not just limited to network configurations but can also be used to customize other OS and/or application settings.
The deployment script which runs outside of the GuestOS and instantiates new Instant Clones using the vSphere API. This script is responsible for passing in data (network configuration, OS and/or application settings) to the GuestOS which can then be accessed directly by the user defined script running within each Instant Clone for actual customization.

To demonstrate the use of the Instant Clone API, I will be using PowerCLI and have also created an Instant Clone PowerCLI module called InstantClone.psm1. However, the API is not limited to just PowerCLI and can be consumed using any of the new vSphere 6.7 SDKs. For our example, we will be exercising the creating Instant Clones from a "Frozen" Source VM workflow since that is the most efficient method, especially as you scale to larger number of Instant Clones. For those that wish to experiment with the other workflow of creating Instant Clones from a "Running" Source VM, feel free to take a look at the previous post for the required steps.

For my setup, I will be using an Ubuntu Server 16.04 system as my Source VM and I will create 30 Instant Clones from this system. Each Instant Clone will immediately be available for use and will be fully customized and reachable from a network perspective (e.g. unique IP and MAC Address). Here is a screenshot of one of my deployments to give you an idea of how blazing fast Instant Clone is 🙂

Here is a short video that I just recorded that demos the Instant Clone APIs using PowerCLI (this demo is using an Ubuntu VM configured with 2GB memory where as the original screenshot was 1GB)

Demo of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 from lamw on Vimeo. [Read more...] about New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 2