Extracting GuestOS IDs From vCloud Director

There was an interesting question on the VMTN forums last week on capturing the list of supported guest operating systems using the vCloud APIs. This feature is currently not available today using the vCloud API, as it there is no way to extract the list of supported guestOS identifiers. If you take a look at the vCloud Director User Guide, you can get a list of supported guestOSes, but it does not translate to the API identifiers that is needed when provisioning a VM in vCloud Director.

The list of supported guestOS types are stored in the vCloud Director database and you can extract the guestOS IDs if you have access to the database or a DBA that manages the database. Using the following SQL query, you can get the list of supported guestOSes that includes the API ID and description. Since the list of guestOSes are inserted upon installation, I have already captured the output for a default vCloud Director 1.5 instance for your reference.

Disclaimer: This SQL query is not supported by VMware nor should you directly access the vCloud Database as a best practice without the consent of VMware Support.

In this example, I am querying the list of default guestOSes from a vCloud Director 1.5 instance that was installed on Oracle XE database.

First you need to set several environmental variables for your respective ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID and update your PATH variable (your paths will vary based on your installation + OS):

[root@vcd ~]# export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe
[root@vcd ~]# export ORACLE_SID=XE
[root@vcd ~]# export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin

Next we will login using sqlplus and you will need to know the username and password of the vCloud Director database that was configured during installation:

[root@vcd ~]# sqlplus "vcloud/vcloud"
SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.2.0 Production on Tue Nov 1 19:30:24 2011
Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Express Edition Release 11.2.0.2.0 - 64bit Production

Before we execute the query, we need to set a few parameters to help with the readability of the output:

SET ECHO OFF
SET WRAP OFF
SET FEEDBACK OFF
SET PAGESIZE 0
SET HEADING OFF

Now we are ready to execute the SQL statement:

SQL> select internal_name||' == '||display_name from guest_os_type order by display_name;

Note: I am not a SQL expert nor DBA, I am sure there are other variations of formatting.

Here is a screenshot of the execution above:

The list of supported default guestOS types in vCloud Director 1.5 is 80:

If you have ever worked with the vSphere API, you will notice the guestOS API IDs are exactly the same as the guestOS Identifiers found in the vSphere API. vSphere 5 supports a total of 105 guestOSes and 80 of those are supported in vCloud Director.

A feature request has already been submitted to be able to query for the list of supported guestOSes using the vCloud API. For now, this is another way of retrieving API guestOS identifier without having to manually create each guestOS type through the web interface and query for the identifier.