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pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) 5.5.0-2014.1 released!

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I just saw an awesome update from Shawn Hartsock, a fellow VMware colleague. For those of you who do not know him, Shawn works in our Ecosystems and Solutions Engineering (EASE) organization and is the primary maintainer of VMware's pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) open-source project. The pyvmomi project was open sourced since last December which I had written about here, it has received over 3K+ downloads and has a very active community. Much of this success has been due to the hard from Shawn fostering an active community around pyvmomi.

The announcement today from Shawn is a new release of pyvmomi at version 5.5.0-2014.1:

As mentioned earlier, the pyvmomi project is a very active project and Shawn is constantly engaging with users looking for feedback, suggestions or requests for new samples to build. If you are interested in vSphere Automation and would like to leverage Python, be sure to check out the pyvmomi Github repository! Lastly, if you have written some cool scripts/applications or would like to request specific sample scripts, be sure to send a pull request to Shawn as we would love to see more contributions and collaborations from the community!

Quick Tip - How to enable Docker Remote API?

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I have been playing around with Docker lately in my home lab and have primarily been using the Docker CLI. While going through the documentation, I found that Docker also provides a nice remote REST API which by default, seems to be disabled. I was searching online but could not find any tutorials that provides clear instructions on how to enable the remote API for an Ubuntu Virtual Machine that I recently built to run Docker.

With some trial and error, I was able to finally figure out what was needed and figure I would document this for myself and for anyone else who maybe interested.

If you have Docker running on an Ubuntu (14.04 is what I'm using), you will need to edit /etc/init/docker.conf and update the DOCKER_OPTS variable to the following:

DOCKER_OPTS='-H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock'

This will have Docker bind to port 4243 which will be used by the Docker Remote API. One you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the Docker process by running the following command:

service docker restart

To test that the Docker Remote API has been properly enabled, we will list the Images currently in Docker (this assumes you have at least pulled down one image from the Docker Hub Registry).

In my environment, I have the following Docker Images:

enable-docker-remote-api-1
Using my Firefox browser and the RESTClient plugin, I can perform a GET operation on the following URL: http://172.30.0.199:4243/images/json as described in the Docker Remote API.

enable-docker-remote-api-2
As we can see from the screenshot above, we see the same Images displayed from the remote API. You can also easily test this by using cURL on the command-line by running the following command:

curl -X GET http://172.30.0.199:4243/images/json

If you are running CoreOS (which I also have running in my vSphere environment), you can enable the Docker remote API by following the documentation here. Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone looking to enable the Remote API but not able to find the exact steps.

How to quickly deploy CoreOS on ESXi?

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deploy-coreos-on-esxiThere has been a tremendous amount of buzz lately regarding Docker, a platform that allows developers to easily build, deploy and manage Linux Containers. Docker can run on variety of Linux Distributions, one that has been quite popular lately is a new Linux Distribution called CoreOS.

CoreOS is actually a fork of Google's ChromeOS and was designed to run next generation workloads similar to those at Google and Facebook. A major benefit of CoreOS is the minimal footprint the base operating system consumes which allows for maximum resource utilization for the Container workloads.

Having heard so much about Docker and CoreOS, I figure this would be a great opportunity to explore and learn about a new technology which I always enjoy when I get the time. I know Duncan Epping has written an article on how to run CoreOS on VMware Fusion, but since I primarily work with vSphere, I wanted to run CoreOS on ESXi. The first place I went to was the CoreOS documentation and there is a section for VMware. After going through the instructions, I found the process to be quite manual and potentially requiring additional tools as a simple OVF/OVA for CoreOS did not exist.

I figured I could wrap the process in a very simple shell script that only required a couple of input parameters from the user based on their environment and the script would auto-magically handle the deployment. I created a shell script that would run on the ESXi Shell called deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh

Note: The script assumes you can connect directly to the CoreOS website to download the zip directly onto the ESXi host.

There are three variables that you will need to edit prior to running the script:

  • DATASTORE_PATH - The full path to the Datastore to deploy CoreOS onto (e.g. /vmfs/volumes/datastore)
  • VM_NETWORK - The name of the vSphere Network to connect the CoreOS VM to
  • VM_NAME - The name of the CoreOS VM

Once you have finished editing the script, you just need to scp to your ESXi host and run the script using the following command:

./deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh

Here is screenshot of running the script:

deploy-coreos-on-esxi-0
Once the script has completed, you should see a new CoreOS VM on your ESXi host and if you have DHCP, you should also see an associated IP Address in the VM Console:

deploy-coreos-on-esxi-1
Once the CoreOS VM is booted up, you use the SSH key that was included in the zip file, by default it is also extracted into the CoreOS VM directory. You can SSH into the VM by running the following command:

ssh -i insecure_ssh_key core@IP-ADDRESS-OF-COREOS-VM

Once logged in, we can run "docker images" to see a list of Containers. As you can see that there is only one and we can connect to that Container by running the "toolbox" command which will pull down the latest and then connect to that Container as seen in the screenshot below.

deploy-coreos-on-esxi-3
I was hoping that I could also get VMware Tools installed within the CoreOS VM, but I was not able to get SSH working within the Toolbox as stated in the Install Debugging Tools documentation. I may need to tinker around a bit more with CoreOS.

If you are interested in other methods of deploying CoreOS, be sure to check out CoreOS's documentation.

Additional Resources: