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Exploring VSAN APIs Part 7 - VSAN Datastore Folder Management

03.26.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

In addition to storing your Virtual Machines, you may also want to use the VSAN Datastore to store your operating system ISOs in case you do not have an external repository and would like to keep everything local. If you use the vSphere Web Client to perform this operation, you will notice that you will need to first create a top-level directory before you can upload an ISO or a file to the VSAN Datastore.

The reason for this is that the VSAN Datastore does not support files in the top level directory, so you will have to first create a top-level directory and then upload the files under that directory. To create these top-level directories, a new DatastoreNameSpaceManager is introduced in the vSphere 5.5 API which manages the creation and deletion of these directories. Once these top-level directories exists, you can then use the regular fileManager API to manage your files and sub-directories within the VSAN Datastore. To demonstrate the creation of a top-level directory and sub-directory in a VSAN Datastore, I have created a sample vSphere SDK for Perl script called vsanDatstoreFolderMgmt.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.

In this example, I will create a top-level directory in the VSAN Datastore called ISO and then a sub-directory under that called Linux by running the following command:

./vsanDatstoreFolderMgmt.pl --server vcenter55-1.primp-industries.com --username root --vsan-datastore vsanDatastore --root-folder ISO --sub-folder Linux

The script will first call the DatastoreNameSpaceManager CreateDirectory() API method which will then create the top-level directory and then using the fileManager's MakeDirectory() API method to create the sub-directory. If we take a look at our VSAN Datastore using the vSphere Web Client, we can see that our new top-level directory has been created along with our sub-directory.

For deleting sub-directories and the top-level directories, there is the DeleteDatastoreFile_Task() and DeleteDirectory() API method respectively.

Quick Tip - Adding a custom prefix to your VCSIM environment

03.16.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I just discovered this neat little feature of VCSIM (vCenter Server Simulator) which allows you to append a global string prefix to all vSphere objects in your inventory. I am not sure if this capability has always been there but definitely can be useful if you plan on running multiple VCSIM environments, this can be an easy way to uniquely identify a particular configuration.

To add the custom prefix, you will need to add the <prefix></prefix> tags to your VCSIM inventory configuration file. You can take a look at the default template /etc/vmware-vpx/vcsim/model/initInventory.cfg to get an idea of the available configurations.

Here is a the sample VCSIM configuration file for the inventory in the screenshot above:

<config>
  <inventory>
    <dc>1</dc>
    <host-per-dc>0</host-per-dc>
    <vm-per-host>0</vm-per-host>
    <poweron-vm-per-host>0</poweron-vm-per-host>
    <cluster-per-dc>1</cluster-per-dc>
    <host-per-cluster>2</host-per-cluster>
    <rp-per-cluster>1</rp-per-cluster>
    <vm-per-rp>3</vm-per-rp>
    <poweron-vm-per-rp>3</poweron-vm-per-rp>
    <dv-portgroups>0</dv-portgroups>
  </inventory>
  <prefix>vGhetto-</prefix>
  <worker-threads>1</worker-threads>
  <synchronous>true</synchronous>
</config>

Automating Horizon View deployments using VCT & cURL

03.11.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Last week I spent a couple of days playing around with the new Horizon View Configuration Tool (VCT) Fling and as part of my "exploration" of VCT, I needed to re-run the deployment. Going through the guided wizard the first time was fine, but if you needed to do that 5-10 times, then it was not very fun. Since VCT was a simple web application, I decided to fire up one of my favorite tool, Firebug to do some poking around.

It turns out the payload request was actually very simple and it contains all the variables for each of the parameters that a user would specify through the UI and a single HTTP POST request is then sent to the web application for deployment. I took all the variables and created a simple shell script that a user can easily edit without having to worry about fat-fingering on the UI as there is no form validation at the moment and then send the POST request using my other favorite tool cURL.

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

You can download the script here called automateVCT.sh

Before running the script, you will need to edit the variables for your environment and if you have an existing Active Directory server, then there are some variables that you can leave off. Towards the bottom of the script, there is an infinite loop that will run to continuously to check the current status which is then printed on the screen every 10 seconds. For practical use, you will probably want to change the timing to something a bit longer like every 5 minutes for a status.

Here is an example of executing the script:

As you can see from the screenshot, once the request has been accepted by VCT, the status will be printed on the screen which is the same status shown in the UI. If everything was successful, you should eventually see the status display the IP Address of your Horizon View environment like the following:

This script really came in handy for testing VCT and I thought it would be great to share it with the community so you can automate the deployment of your Horizon View environment using VCT!