In my previous article Extracting Information from VIN (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator) Part 1, we took a look at the data VIN was collecting through an interface called Jolokia. Utilizing a tool called j4psh, we were able to easily view and explore the data in VIN remotely. In this article, we will take a look at how easily you can extract the data we explored in the previous article using a very simple script.
While going through the Jolokia website and walking through the tutorial, I found there were several programmatic clients that could be used to connect to the Jolokia service which includes Java, Javascript and Perl. Since I am most familiar with Perl, I wrote a very simple Perl script called getVINData.pl leveraging the information from my previous article.
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk.
Before using the script, you will need to run through the two per-requisites outlined in the previous blog article: VIN appliance setup and installation of Jmx4Perl. Once you have completed these two steps, you are now ready to execute the script (make sure the script has the executable permission set). The script is pretty straight forward it accepts two input parameter: VIN hostname/IP Address and the name of the virtual machine you wish to query.
In the example below, I am connecting to my VIN host which has an IP Address of 172.30.0.150 and I am querying a virtual machine with the name Analytics VM (one of the vC Ops VMs).
From the screenshot above we can see the following:
- The vCenter Server that VIN is currently registered to
- VM Summary information
- Applications/Services currently running on the VM
- VM Dependencies
If we take a look at the vSphere Web Client and the VIN data for this particular VM, we should see the same set information:
Though the script already contains quite a bit of information, it is just a sample of what can be done. With further exploration you can easily extend the script to extract other pieces of information and possibly even use other scripting/programming languages to connect to this interface. As I mentioned before, VIN is a very powerful tool for your vSphere infrastructure and now you can gain additional benefits by leveraging it's valuable data externally!
As long as it'll maximize the overall system of PC even if, it is not an official method used and presented by VMware it'll be fine. I see that it could enhance and boost the data a system could hold up so perhaps, I could try this out first in my PC.
Should you ever need an export of the Infrastructure Navigator dependencies then use a VROPS custom report on VM level.
This can be exported as CSV and be re-used. You need VROPS Advanced to use VIN, just install the VIN management pack and create a custom View.