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Using VMC API to answer commonly asked questions about your SDDC

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In the past month or so since joining the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) team, I have seen a number of inquiries from our Customer Success team, partners and customers on how to retrieve certain pieces information about their deployed SDDC, usually for information or integration purposes. Some of these questions can simply be answered by using the VMC Console UI, however there are others that is only available when using the VMC API, which provides a ton more data than what the UI could ever display. In any case, I figure it would be useful to share some of this information, especially as it pertains to the VMC API.

Below are just some of the frequently asked questions that I have seen and they can all be answered simply performing a GET /api/orgs/<orgId>/sddcs/<sddcId> on your specific SDDC via VMC API. In addition, I have also create two sample scripts which exercises these VMC APIs, one using the native VMC REST API and another with PowerCLI using the VMC cmdlet, which you can find more details below.

1) What version is my SDDC running?

This can be found in the VMC Console UI under the "Support" tab for a given SDDC.


You can also find this information using the VMC API by referring to the resource_config.sddc_manifest.vmc_version property.

2) When was my SDDC created?

This can be found in the VMC Console UI under the "Support" tab for a given SDDC.


You can also find this information using the VMC API by referring to the created property.

3) How long do I have until my 1-Node SDDC expires?

This can be found in the VMC Console UI under the SDDC card summary view or detailed view.


You can also find this information using the VMC API by referring to the expiration_date property. This property will be null if your SDDC is NOT a 1-Node, which is the only configuration which has an expiration.

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Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 US Sessions

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It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most, if not all VMworld 2018 US session recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different  categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 585 sessions with 570 published with recordings. I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

UPDATE 1 (09/01/18) - It looks after publishing the streaming URLs, folks found that it included a direct download link to the .MP4 file. Thanks to Jorge de la Cruz from the community who was able to extract this from my original github repo. I have gone ahead and also updated my repo to include both the streaming and download URL for folks who just want to download individual sessions. There are a number of ways to "Automate" the download including using wget or Invoke-Webrequest.

UPDATE 2 (09/03/18) - If you try to download the files without going through my github repo (browser or through automation), you may noticed you get a 404 error message. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4 -O VIN2527BU.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "http://www.vmware.com"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile VIN2527BU.mp4

In addition, I have also published us.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.

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