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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 6

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In Part 6, we will take a look at how we can use the new VAMI APIs to easily associate the underlying VMDKs to their respective OS disk partitions for a VCSA or PSC node. In addition, the workflow of increasing the disk capacity for a specific partition has also been simplified further with the new VAMI APIs. After increasing the specific VMDK size, we can now also trigger the partition resize operation using the VAMI APIs, where as before this used to be a manual task that required SSH access. In vSphere 6.5, there have been a few minor changes to the VCSA's VMDK layout and sizes, for more details, please have a look at this blog post here.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

Unfortunately, there is not a page within the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA]:5480) that either lists or provides the actual mapping of the underlying VMDKs to their respective partition types. You can see the different VMDKs using the vSphere Web/C# Client, but historically the mapping of VMDK to partition type was done manually or you would refer to the table found in the blog post referenced above. Lets see if we can pull this information without needing to go to a UI 🙂

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/system/storage
  • POST /appliance/system/storage/resize

PowerCLI Function

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 5

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In Part 5, we are now going to have a look at networking section of the VAMI UI.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

In the Networking tab, under the "Manage" sub-tab, you can find details about the system Hostname (PNID), DNS servers as well as the configurations for each network interface (in the case of a VCHA deployment, you would have more than one network interface configured).

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/networking/dns/hostname
  • GET /appliance/networking/dns/servers
  • GET /appliance/networking/interfaces
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/networking/ipv4

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


This sample script only retrieves IPv4 networking information, but you can easily retrieve IPv6 information by calling into the IPv6 VAMI API endpoints which you can refer to the documentation or the API Explorer for more details.

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 4

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In Part 4, we are now going to shift our attention to a very important topic which often gets overlooked and is also usually one of the culprits for many infrastructure issues. What am I referring to? Time Synchronization! You would not believe the number of times that I hear about an issue (not always VMware-related) and after looking into it, the issue was because the user did not have proper time synchronization configured or worse, it was not even running at all. I will agree, it is not always the easiest thing to check for and sometimes there may not even be an API to use, which makes it that much more difficult. Lets see how we can verify our time settings using the new VAMI APIs.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/system/time
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/timesync
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/ntp

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


With this function, not only can you verify that you have NTP configured and it is up and running, but you can also easily get the current system time and compare that with the rest of your other infrastructure to ensure the VCSA/PSC is not time drifting. Historically, to be able to retrieve this information, you normally had to login via SSH and run a couple commands on the Shell and just imagine if you needed to do this across all of your vSphere environments?