PowerCLI – Page 51

How to tell if an ESXi host is a VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance programmatically?

09.26.2016 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I had received this question awhile back but I was only able to get to it recently. If you are not familiar with the VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance and its purpose, Cormac Hogan did an excellent write-up on the topic which you can find it here.

The reason this question came up was that if you were to simply iterate over all ESXi hosts within your vSphere Inventory from an Automation standpoint, you might find a mix of regular ESXi hosts and potentially this new VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance which is basically an ESXi host that runs in a VM (e.g. Nested ESXi). Although, it may look and feel like a regular ESXi host, it is not and the question was how might you go about distinguishing between the two? You can of course setup specific naming standards, folder structure or separate datacenter objects, but you still may accidentally retrieve a VSAN Witness host without even realizing it.

One quick solution is to check for a specific ESXi Advanced Setting called Misc.vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance which will return a value of 1 if it is the VSAN Witness Appliance. Here is a quick PowerCLI snippet which demonstrates how you can access this property:

$vmhost = Get-VMHost -Name 192.168.1.115
Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vmhost -Name Misc.vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance

Although the method described above is one quick way to easily identify whether an ESXi host is a VSAN Witness Appliance, it is also limited in the information that it provides you. Another approach is to actually use the new VSAN 6.2 Management API and specifically the Stretched Clustering System APIs to retrieve the associated VSAN Witness host for a given VSAN Cluster. Not only will you get more information about the specific ESXi host providing the VSAN Witness functionality which will allow you to correlate back to your vSphere Inventory, but you will also get additional VSAN Witness configuration such as the preferred Fault Domain, Node UUID and the VSAN Cluster that it is associated with for example.

Here is a quick VSAN Management SDK for Python sample script that I had created called vsan-stretched-cluster-system-sample.py which implements the VSANVcGetWitnessHosts() API method. The script prints out a few of the WitnessHostInfo properties as shown in the screenshot below.

One other option is if you simply just want to know if a given ESXI host is a VSAN Witness host or not, there is also the VSANVcIsWitnessHost() API that simply returns a boolean value. This might useful if you just have a list of ESXi hosts retrieved through the vSphere API and no knowledge of the underlying VSAN Clusters.

VMware PowerCLI for Mac OS X, Linux & More? Yes, please!

09.06.2016 by William Lam // 10 Comments

There were a several announcements at last weeks VMworld US Conference, but one of the most exciting piece of news in my opinion was from Alan Renouf, Product Manager for all things API/SDK/CLI at VMware. During Alan's What's New PowerCLI session, he announced that PowerCLI is finally coming to both Mac OS X as well as Linux! As you can imagine, the news was very well received from customers and partners. In fact, after I had tweeted the update here & here, I literally had folks pinging/IM'ing/DM'ing me non-stop about when they could get access 🙂

UPDATE (10/18/16) - PowerCLI Multi-Platform (MP) for Linux and Mac OS X has now been released as a VMware Fling. Please find the download here and provide any feedback in the comments section.

This exciting update was only possible with the help of our friends over at Microsoft who had recently open sourced both .NET Core & PowerShell. Once that news broke, Alan and the PowerCLI Engineering team have been working hard on porting over the existing PowerCLI code which uses the Windows .NET library over to the new .NET Core which is now open sourced. I have been very impressed at how fast the PowerCLI team have already made available many of the default cmdlets as well as the Get View cmdlet which exposes the entire functionality of the vSphere API.

Now, before you get too excited, this new version of PowerCLI is currently not available yet. As Alan mentioned in his session, we plan to release an early Tech Preview of PowerCLI for both Mac OS X and Linux as a VMware Fling shortly after VMworld. It is also very important to note that Microsoft PowerShell for Mac OS X & Linux which PowerCLI uses is just at an Alpha release milestone. There is still much work to do on both sides but I am really looking forward to enabling our customers with the choice of platform when it comes to consuming PowerCLI.

A few of us have been quite fortunate to have been involved in the early development of this new version of PowerCLI. In fact, we even built a simple Docker Container for PowerCLI which will allow you to easily access PowerCLI from any system that can run Docker. Here is a quick screenshot of spinning up a PowerCLI Docker Container which will also be part of the Fling release.

Lastly, we want customers to be able to quickly and securely set up a persistent PowerCLI environment in which they can use to manage and configure their VMware-based products that support PowerCLI. With that, we have also built a PowerShell package for Photon OS which is VMware's minimal Linux container host distribution. Not only is it free to download and use, but it literally takes a few seconds to install (tdnf -y install powershell) and even less time to boot up and import the PowerCLI module. This was literally done the week before VMworld by the Photon team and huge kudos for their support! As you can see, not only do we want to provide choice for our customers but also simplifying how you might consume PowerCLI whether its natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Docker Container or running on top of VMware Photon OS. I hope you are excited as I am and stay tuned for more details on the Fling release!

If you have any feedback or what you are most excited regarding this news, please leave a comment and I will make sure it makes it way back to our Product Manager.

Quick Tip - How to retrieve the ESXi Update Level using the vSphere API?

08.17.2016 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Using the vSphere API, it is very easy to extract the version and build of all your ESXi hosts. This information is exposed in the Product property of an ESXi host. For example, Product.Version will return something like 6.0.0 and Product.Build will return something like 3029758. However, one thing that is not available in this property is the Update Level information for an ESXi host such as Update 1 or Update 2.

Historically, customers would have to rely on ESXCLI to pull the Update level information using the following command: esxcli system version get and though this can be run remotely or integrated into PowerCLI as shown in the example below, it would be ideal if this information was just available using the vSphere API.

	$esxcli = Get-EsxCli

	### To retrieve Major/Update version number of ESXi via ESXCLI

	PS C:\Users\lamw\Desktop> $esxcli.system.version.get().version + " Update" + $esxcli.system.version.get().update
	6.0.0 Update1

	### To retrieve all version information from ESXi via ESXCLI

	PS C:\Users\lamw\Desktop> $esxcli.system.version.get()

	Build : Releasebuild-3029758
	Patch : 17
	Product : VMware ESXi
	Update : 1
	Version : 6.0.0

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This exact same question was brought up internally again today and Etienne Le Sueur actually shared an awesome tidbit on how to retrieve this information using the vSphere API. You can find the ESXi Update Level information in an ESXi Advanced Setting called Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel

Below is a quick PowerCLI example which exercises this vSphere API to retrieve the Version, Build and Update Level information:

$vmhost = Get-VMHost -Name nuc.primp-industries.com

$esxi_version = $vmhost.ExtensionData.Config.Product.Version
$esxi_build = $vmhost.ExtensionData.Config.Product.Build
$esxi_update_level = (Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vmhost -Name Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel).value

Write-Host "$vmhost" 
Write-Host "`tVersion: $esxi_version"
Write-Host "`tUpdate: $esxi_update_level"
Write-Host "`tBuild: $esxi_build"

Here is a screenshot of the output for my ESXi host which is running latest vSphere 6.0 Update 2 (including the recent patch release).

Its great to hear that the ESXi Update Level information is available through the vSphere API, although I would have liked to have seen it exposed within the Product property. Perhaps its time to file an internal Feature Request? 🙂