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Quick Tip - Requirements for using Guest Operation APIs (Invoke-VMScript & Copy-VMGuestFile) in VMC

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Since this question came up again today, I figure it was worth sharing in case others also had trouble using the vSphere Guest Operations API in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), which includes PowerCLI's Invoke-VMScript and Copy-VMGuestFile cmdlet. There are a couple of requirements that you must satisfy both in the GuestOS as well as between your on-prem vSphere environment and VMC.

  1. VMware Tools installed and running, it may seem obvious, but I have had customers trying to use various scripts without realizing this was a requirement. You should also ensure that you are running the latest version of VMware Tools, especially as there bugfixes that may impact Guest Operations APIs.
  2. VPN or Direct Connect (DX) configured between your on-prem vSphere environment and VMC, this is required as you will need access to ESXi hosts which is only available through a VPN or DX
  3. Create a VMC firewall rule to allow access from your on-prem network to VMC's ESXi hosts on port 443 which is used for Guest Operations access including transferring files to and from the GuestOS


The VMC firewall rule is usually the thing that most folks forget about and this simply because for most on-prem environment, access to ESXi over 443 is just sort of a default.

Once you have configured the VMC firewall to allow 443 to ESXi hosts, you will be able to use the Guest Operations API including Invoke-VMScript and Copy-VMGuestFile to a VM running in VMC

Identifying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) managed service accounts in vCenter Server

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When users log in to a vCenter Server to manage roles and permissions within a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 environment, they may notice several accounts that already have vSphere permissions assigned.


This might come as a surprise, especially if you do not recall creating these users, let alone granting them privileges within vCenter Server.

A large majority of the user accounts that you see are internal to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and represents the different application services running within the VCSA. There are also a handful of VCF accounts that are automatically created to enable communication between the various VCF components, but at the end of the day these are all service accounts that is either managed by vCenter Server or VCF.

With that said, it might be useful to understand which of these accounts are service accounts, so organizations can properly audit their environment for compliance and configuration management.

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Quick Tip - Using PowerCLI to query VMware Tools Configuration at scale 

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One of the most powerful and versatile VM management capability in vSphere is the Guest Operations API, providing a rich set of operations from transferring files to/from the guest to running commands directly on the guest as if you were logged in!

An easy way to consume the Guest Operations API is via PowerCLI and using the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet, which I have extensively written about, showcasing all the creative ways this can be used to solve various automation challenges.

I recently came across a Reddit thread where the OP wanted to check to query for a specific VMware Tools configuration as part of the vSphere Security Configuration Guide and was looking for some help as logging into each and every system did not seem like a good idea, which it is NOT! 🙂

Any time you have a use case where you need to scale a specific operation (reading or writing) a change, you should consider Guest Operations API, you can easily use a single API to perform this operation at scale!

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