Automation – Page 188

Extracting VID, DID & SVID from PCI devices in ESXi using vSphere API

05.18.2015 by William Lam // 3 Comments

From time to time, you may need to collect some hardware related information such as PCI devices found within your ESXi hosts. In the past, you may have gone directly to the ESXi Shell running some of the legacy esxcfg-* commands for extracting things like the PCI device's Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID) and Sub Vendor ID (SVID) which can be used to correlate against VMware's HCL as seen in the screenshot below.

I personally try to stay out of the ESXi Shell if I can help it and prefer to retrieve these things using an API, such as the vSphere API. Historically, I too thought the VID, DID & SVID properties were only available within the ESXi Shell, but they are actually readily available in the vSphere API. You can find all PCI devices under the hardware.pciDevice property of an ESXi host and below are the three variables that map to these properties.

Vendor ID (VID) = vendorId
Device ID (DID) = deviceId
Sub Vendor ID (SVID) = subVendorId

To quickly demonstrate how you can extract this information using the vSphere API which can be done by connecting either directly to an ESXi host or by going to vCenter Server, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called queryHostPCIInfo.ps1.

Here is an example output of running the script against my Mac Mini and we can see details such as the device name, vendor and the respective VID, DID & SVID values.

If there are other properties which you still find yourself going directly to the ESXi Shell, please leave a comment as I know the PM's are interested in these information and is working hard to ensure that all these properties are available through our vSphere API.

How to download offline VSAN HCL file for VSAN Health Check Plugin?

05.16.2015 by William Lam // 4 Comments

One of the coolest features in the new VSAN Health Check Plugin is the automatic verification of your underlying hardware (hosts, disks, storage controller & drivers) by automatically checking it against VMware's VSAN HCL (Hardware Compatibility List).

The VSAN HCL database can either be downloaded automatically from VMware.com or manually uploaded if you do not have direct or proxy internet access. There was a question this morning on Twitter asking where the offline VSAN HCL file be downloaded from? I was actually curious as well and looking at Cormac Hogan's excellent VSAN Health Check documentation, I found the answer at the very end of the document 🙂

http://partnerweb.vmware.com/service/vsan/all.json

To download the offline VSAN HCL file which is actually is just a JSON file, you just need to load the above URL into a web browser and then save the file.

After you have downloaded the VSAN HCL file, you can either upload using the vSphere Web Client under the "Health" section of the VSAN Health Plugin or you using the following RVC command and specifying the path to the file:

vsan.health.hcl_update_db /localhost/ -l /root/all.json

As a bonus, I also had some fun parsing the VSAN HCL JSON file. Below is a graph that I was able to generate after extracting some useful information using the following script found here.

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 8: Useful ldapsearch queries for vmdird

05.06.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Last week I demonstrated how you can connect to the VMware Directory Service (vmdird) in vSphere 6.0 using JXPlorer, a graphical LDAP browser to extract useful information such as all the deployed vCenter Servers and Platform Services Controllers in your environment. I have also shown in past articles on how you can also retrieve this information programmatically which I have described here and here. Since vmdird is an LDAP-based system, we can also easily retrieve this information using simple LDAP commands that you may already be familiar with.

Disclaimer: Please take extreme caution when connecting to the vmdird database, this is primary for educational purposes. You should take extreme care in making changes while in the database else you can negatively impact your environment.

For performing search queries within an LDAP system, we can use the ldapsearch command which is available among other commands within the VCSA as well as other *NIX based system including Mac OS X. You can use this command to connect to both Windows and the VCSA running either an Embedded deployment or just the Platform Services Controller services.

Below are three useful ldapserach queries for identifying all deployed vCenter Servers and Platform Services Controllers including the SSO Site Name. The parameters highlighted below in blue will need to be modified based on your environment. The -h parameter specifies the Hostname/IP Address of your PSC, the -w parameter is the SSO Administrator password and the dc property is the name of SSO Domain.

Finding all deployed vCenter Servers:

/opt/likewise/bin/ldapsearch -h psc-01.primp-industries.com -w 'VMware1!' -x -D "cn=Administrator,cn=Users,dc=vghetto,dc=local" -b "ou=Computers,dc=vghetto,dc=local" -s one "objectclass=computer" cn

Finding all deployed Platform Service Controllers:

/opt/likewise/bin/ldapsearch -h psc-01.primp-industries.com -w 'VMware1!' -x -D "cn=Administrator,cn=Users,dc=vghetto,dc=local" -b "ou=domain controllers,dc=vghetto,dc=local" -s one "objectclass=computer" cn

Finding SSO Site Name:

/opt/likewise/bin/ldapsearch -h psc-01.primp-industries.com -w 'VMware1!' -x -D "cn=Administrator,cn=Users,dc=vghetto,dc=local" -b "cn=Sites,cn=Configuration,dc=vghetto,dc=local" "objectclass=container"