Automating Horizon View deployments using VCT & cURL

Last week I spent a couple of days playing around with the new Horizon View Configuration Tool (VCT) Fling and as part of my "exploration" of VCT, I needed to re-run the deployment. Going through the guided wizard the first time was fine, but if you needed to do that 5-10 times, then it was not very fun. Since VCT was a simple web application, I decided to fire up one of my favorite tool, Firebug to do some poking around.

It turns out the payload request was actually very simple and it contains all the variables for each of the parameters that a user would specify through the UI and a single HTTP POST request is then sent to the web application for deployment. I took all the variables and created a simple shell script that a user can easily edit without having to worry about fat-fingering on the UI as there is no form validation at the moment and then send the POST request using my other favorite tool cURL.

Disclaimer:  These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

You can download the script here called automateVCT.sh

Before running the script, you will need to edit the variables for your environment and if you have an existing Active Directory server, then there are some variables that you can leave off. Towards the bottom of the script, there is an infinite loop that will run to continuously to check the current status which is then printed on the screen every 10 seconds. For practical use, you will probably want to change the timing to something a bit longer like every 5 minutes for a status.

Here is an example of executing the script:

As you can see from the screenshot, once the request has been accepted by VCT, the status will be printed on the screen which is the same status shown in the UI. If everything was successful, you should eventually see the status display the IP Address of your Horizon View environment like the following:

This script really came in handy for testing VCT and I thought it would be great to share it with the community so you can automate the deployment of your Horizon View environment using VCT!