Automation – Page 206

Quick Tip - Offline viewing of vSphere API & other API docs using Dash

06.06.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

As a frequent consumer of the vSphere API, a must have bookmark for all my systems (work/personal) is the vSphere API Reference document. In my opinion, This is a must have for anyone that is serious about vSphere Automation and having it be an online document, it allows you to quickly search for a specific property or method. The problem with an online document of course is that if you are not connected to the internet, you will not have access to it. VMware does provides an offline version for viewing which is bundled within the vSphere Management SDK.

This morning when I woke up, I was going through the list of sites that I read on a regular basis such as Y Hacker News and the top entry at the moment was "Dash - Beautiful instance offline docs for almost everything". I quickly realized this was not the first time I had heard of this tool, my good friend Timo Sugliani had actually introduced me to Dash a couple months back and he even mentioned it might be possible to view the vSphere API documents. After installing Dash, I did not see the vSphere API docs from what I recall and I just never had time to play with it again. I figure it has been awhile, maybe I should give it another try? I updated Dash this morning to latest version and noticed that the vSphere API documentation is now available and covers vSphere 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5.

Once you have downloaded the specific vSphere API documentation, you can then quickly browse or search through the different class objects, methods, properties and enumeration values. You can see from the screenshot below, it will automatically search through all your documentation include online searches on such as Google and Stack Overflow which I thought was pretty neat.

In addition to being able to easily view the vSphere API documentation offline, but you can also view other types of API documentation. Dash currently supports over 290+ documentation sets and you can even create your own doc sets and contribute them back to Dash. The other neat thing about Dash which I have not tried yet is the plugin integration with popular IDEs like Sublime, Textmate, Eclipse to just name a few. The only downside I see at the moment is that Dash is only for Mac OSX, but it looks like there might be plans to support a Windows version later this year. If you work with a lot of API documentation, Dash might be something you may want to check out. I know I will start leveraging it when I am offline.

Exploring VSAN APIs Part 10 – VSAN Disk Health

06.04.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

In additional to monitoring storage and host utilization of your VSAN Cluster, the health of the individual disks contributing to your VSAN Cluster is probably one of, if not the most important thing to keep an eye on. In the vSphere Web Client, this information can be accessed by navigating over to the VSAN Disk Management tab as seen in the screenshot below.

Even though this information is available from the UI, it would also be useful to be able to extract this information programmatically using the vSphere API either for external monitoring or informational purposes. I recently had did some work on this, so I figure I might as well share an example script that demonstrates this functionality. To do so, I of course created a sample vSphere SDK for Perl script called vsanDiskHealth.pl

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

The script leverages the QueryPhysicalVsanDisks() API which accepts a list of properties to collect on an individual VSAN Disk. You can also leave the method blank, in which all properties will be returned. For our use case, we are collecting a sub-set of the properties which includes: owner, uuid, isSsd, capacity, capacityUsed, disk_health.

To check the current health of your VSAN Disks, you just need to specify the name of a VSAN enabled Cluster:

./vsanDiskHealth.pl --server .vcenter55-1 --username root --cluster VSAN-Cluster

How to finally inject OVF properties into VCSA when deploying directly onto ESXi?

05.27.2014 by William Lam // 40 Comments

One of my biggest pet peeve when it comes to deploying the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and other OVF/OVA directly onto an ESXi host is the lack of OVF property support. If you have deployed the VCSA before, you are probably aware of the different user experience when deploying to a vCenter Server versus deploying directly to an ESXi host. For those of you who are not familiar, the difference is when you deploy an OVF/OVA that contains custom OVF properties such as the VCSA, you have the ability to provide input to these parameters when deploying to a vCenter Server as seen in the screenshot below.

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