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Quick Tip - Locating SRM Placeholder VMs using the vSphere API

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I had received a question the other day from a reader where they were trying to distinguish between the running VM and its placeholder VM due to their use of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Since the VM name is exactly the same in both vCenter Servers, it was not clear how to identify between the two. As mentioned in my reply to the reader, there are a couple of ways. You could use the SRM API in-conjunction with the vSphere API (in his case, he was using PowerCLI) to be able to check whether the VM in question was the placeholder VM or not.

Another option is to simply use the vSphere API and querying for the managedBy property which is populated when SRM and/or other solutions are associated with managing a set of VMs. In the case of SRM, you will see an extensionKey with value of "com.vmware.vcDR" and type with value of "placeholderVm" which tells you that the VM is an SRM Placeholder VM, pretty easy, right!? 🙂

Since I did not have an SRM environment handy, the next best thing was to check out VMware Hands-On-Lab environment which anyone can access for free. Lab HOL-1705-SDC-1 was exactly what I needed and here is a quick screenshot of the vSphere MOB showing you what the managedBy property looks like in the vSphere API.

To demonstrate the use of this vSphere API, I wrote a quick PowerCLI function called PlaceholderVMs.ps1 and below is an example of running the Get-PlaceholderVM command:

Uniquely identifying VMs in vSphere Part 3: Enhanced Linked Mode & Cross VC-vMotion

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Back in 2012, I had published two articles which provides details and guidance on how to uniquely identify a Virtual Machine for both a vSphere and/or vCloud Director environment. The primary use case for this information was for customers or partners who have developed their own provisioning solution which requires them to track their VM assets throughout their lifecycle, usually in some sort of configuration management database (CMDB).

Although these articles are almost 5 years old, the content is still very relevant today and I still continue to reference them both with customers, partners and even some of our internal R&D folks. Most recently, I had a question about whether the guidance in these article were still applicable or whether they would be impacted by some of the new VMware technologies and capabilities that had been introduced since writing those articles such as Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) and Cross vCenter vMotion (xVC-vMotion).

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vSphere Content Library PowerCLI community module

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I was recently doing some work with the vSphere Content Library and I needed to extract some information using the Content Library API. I was hoping there were a few out of the box PowerCLI cmdlets but to my surprise, there was only one cmdlet called Get-ContentLibraryItem which did not get into the level of details that I was looking for, which was on a per-file level rather than item-level. I had also search the web to see if anyone had built any functions and although a few existed, none that did the very basics which was retrieving all libraries, library items and library item files.

UPDATE (05/05/19) - Updated module with a new function for creating a subscribed Content Library, below is an example:

New-SubscribedContentLibrary -LibraryName NestedESXi -DatastoreName vsanDatastore -SubscriptionURL https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json -SubscriptionThumbprint "7a:c4:08:2d:d3:55:56:af:9f:26:43:65:d0:31:99:0b:d2:f3:d8:69" -OnDemand

UPDATE (11/14/17) - I have recently updated the Content Library module to enhance the Get-ContentLibrary function and added several additional functions listed below

  • Set-ContentLibrary
  • New-ExtReplicatedContentLibrary
  • Remove-SubscribedContentLibrary
  • New-LocalContentLibrary
  • Remove-LocalContentLibrary
  • Copy-ContentLibrary

Not having worked with the Content Library APIs before, I figure this would be a good learning opportunity and created a PowerCLI module called ContentLibrary.psm1 which contains the following functions:

  • Get-ContentLibrary
  • Get-ContentLibraryItems
  • Get-ContentLibraryItemFiles

Before you can make use of these functions, make sure to connect to the CIS endpoint of your vCenter Server using the Connect-CisServer cmdlet.

Here is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client showing all available Content Libraries:


Here is an example of retrieving the same information using the following command:

Get-ContentLibrary


Note: You also have the ability to filter for the name of a specific Content Library by using the -LibraryName parameter

Here is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client showing the individual Items within a Content Library:


Here is an example of retrieving the same information using the following command:

Get-ContentLibraryItems -LibraryName Test


Note: You also have the ability to filter for the name of a specific Content Library Item by using the -LibraryItemName parameter

Although the granularity when using the vSphere Web Client is at a Content Library Item, using the Content Library API, you can get additional information on the Item itself which is then composed of a set of files. The following command will allow you to retrieve all Files or you can use -LibraryItemName parameter to filter on a specific Item.

Get-ContentLibraryItemFiles -LibraryName Test -LibraryItemName TinyVM