WilliamLam.com

New vSAN Management 6.6 API / SDKs / CLIs

by // 2 Comments

With all the new awesome capabilities that have been introduced in vSAN 6.6, there is just as much Automation goodness that will be available for our customers to consume to help them easily mange and operate at scale.

vSAN Management 6.6 API

Below are all the new Managed Objects that have been introduced in the new vSAN Management 6.6 API. This does not even cover all the new methods or object types. For the complete list of vSAN 6.6 APIs, be sure to check out the vSAN Management 6.6 API Reference Guide here.

  • VsanVcsaDeployerSystem – Virtual Center Service Appliance deployment APIs onto vSAN datastore, operating at both vCenter Server and ESXi Host sides
  • VsanVdsSystem – vSAN system optimized VDS related operations, especially migrations from VSS to VDS
  • VsanUpdateManager – VIB installation engine operating at vSAN cluster level (optimized for vSAN clusters)
  • VsanCapabilitySystem – APIs to query vSAN capability, available on both vCenter and ESXi
  • VsanMassCollector – vSAN system management query API's to access data and managed object properties, operating at a vSAN Cluster level in vCenter Server only
  • VsanPhoneHomeSystem – vSAN online health related query API, operating at a vSAN Cluster level in vCenter Server only

[Read more...]

How to determine when a Virtual Machine is ready for additional operations?

by // 3 Comments

This might sound like a pretty simple and basic question, right? However, the answer will actually depend on what you are trying to do. The motivation for this blog post actually stemmed from a conversation I had with one of our Engineers who works over in our core Platform Management Infrastructure which includes VMware Tools, Guest OS Customization, Guest Operations, etc. Although I was aware of some of these methods in determining when a VM was ready, I came to learn about a few new other methods that I was not aware of before. This is really one of the things I love about my job, constantly learning new things and diving deeper into our technologies and sharing that back with our customers to help enable them and their business.

So, what does it even mean for a Virtual Machine to be "ready"? Is it when the VM is powered on? Is it when the VM obtains an IP Address? Is it when the GuestOS is fully customized or is it when I can SSH or RDP to the system? Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, the answer will vary. In addition to that, there are two distinct VM states to consider. The first being the actual Virtual Machine state and the second being the GuestOS state.

Virtual Machine State

The VM state is pretty straight forward, it describes the "Hard" power state of the VM which can either be powered on, powered off or suspended. As you can probably guess, you will need to make sure the VM is powered on before you attempt to check whether the GuestOS is ready 🙂

Using the vSphere API, you can find the VM powerState under:

VirtualMachine->Runtime->powerState

Here is a PowerCLI snippet using the out of box cmdlet to get the power state for a VM named "air":

Get-VM -Name air | Select PowerState

Here is a PowerCLI snippet that uses the vSphere API via Get-View to retrieve the exact same information:

$vm = Get-View -ViewType Virtualmachine -Property Name,Runtime -Filter @{"name"="air"}
$vm.Runtime.PowerState

[Read more...]

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 10

by // 2 Comments

In Part 10, we are going to take a look at local user management for the VAMI interface. By default, only the root local user exists but customers have the option of creating additional accounts. In vSphere 6.5, the VAMI has been enhanced to support different roles such as Admin, Operator and SuperAdmin. You can refer to the VAMI documentation on what each of the roles provides.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

There is not a VAMI UI for user management, this is currently only available using the VAMI REST APIs.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/techpreview/localaccounts/user
  • POST /appliance/techpreview/localaccounts/user
  • DELETE /appliance/techpreview/localaccounts/user/{user-id}

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output

To retrieve all VAMI users, use the Get-VAMIUser function. By default, your system will probably only have the root user unless you have already added additional VAMI users.


To create a new user, we will use the New-VAMIUser which requires a few input parameter that should be pretty self explanatory. The role parameter can be one of three values: admin, operator or superAdmin as defined in the VAMI documentation.

Here is an example of creating a new user called lamw:

New-VAMIUser -name lamw -fullname "William Lam" -role "operator" -email "*protected email*" -password "VMware1!"


If we now re-run our Get-VAMIUser command, we should see the new user that we had just created.


To remove a VAMI user, you simply use the Remove-VAMIUser and specify the name of the user you wish to remove. Below is an example of deleting the user we had just created.


One thing to note is that when using the Connect-CisServer cmdlet to interact with the VAMI REST API, it currently does not support connecting with local VAMI users, only SSO users. This is a limitation with the PowerCLI implementation and does not affect direct use of the VAMI REST API or using it through other SDKs. This is something that will be resolved in a future update of PowerCLI, so something to keep in mind as I was scratching my head when trying to use a local user to authenticate.