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Getting Started with the Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu REST API

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An extremely powerful capability of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is not just getting application data and custom information into App Transformer, but that you can also easily extract that information and use that for a number of other scenarios including but not limited to internal true up of your deployed applications versus what is currently in your Change Management Database (CMDB), inventory analysis across your application vendor and/or versions for auditing, licensing and compliance to identifying vulnerable software versions. The use cases for App Transformer certainly span beyond just App Modernization and can truly be endless!


The App Transformer UI is just one way in which users can interact with the solution but for more advanced workflows or automation purposes, users can also leverage the App Transformer REST API. In this blog post, we take a look at how to get started with the App Transformer REST API.

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How to create a customized ESXi ISO without vCenter Server?

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Historically, if you needed to create a customized ESXi ISO that included additional ESXi drivers, your only supported option was to use the vSphere Image Builder service, which has a dependency on vCenter Server. If you have an existing vCenter Server, this was not a problem and you could easily create a customized ESXi ISO using either the vSphere UI (example here) or the CLI with PowerCLI (example here).

Where this becomes a real challenge is for a greenfield or brand new deployment, where the default ESXi ISO can not be used as it does not contain the required networking and/or storage drivers for the desired hardware platform. Although this affects some customers who use hardware from the VMware HCL but it definitely has a bigger impact on the VMware Homelab community or anyone just getting started for the very first time.

While discussing this topic with a colleague recently, I actually came to learn about an alternative solution for creating a customized ESXi ISO without the need of vCenter Server! Thanks to fellow team member Blair Fritz, who now works in the VMware Cloud Product Management team, for the awesome tip.

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Automating the deployment of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

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I recently wrote about our Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu solution and how it can really benefit IT Admins, beyond just the App Modernization use case which it was primarily designed for. App Transformer is provided as a Virtual Appliance (OVA) and the deployment using the vSphere UI is very straight forward. In this blog post, we will focus on automating the deployment of the App Transformer OVA.

To demonstrate the automation, I have created two example scripts, one that uses PowerCLI and the other using OVFTool. Both scripts contain the exact same variable names that will need to be updated by customers based on their environment. You can find the description for each variable blow covering both the appliance and application settings.

App Transformer Appliance Settings

  • AT_IP - IP Addres
  • AT_NETMASK - Netmask
  • AT_GATEWAY - Gateway
  • AT_DNS - DNS Server
  • AT_DNS_DOMAIN - DNS Search Domain
  • AT_DNS_SEARCH - DNS Search Path
  • AT_NTP - NTP Server
  • AT_ROOT_PASSWORD - Password for root (requires a minimum of 12 characters)

App Transformer Application Settings:

  • AT_USERNAME - Username to login to App Transformer UI
  • AT_PASSWORD - Password to login to App Transformer UI (requires a minimum of 12 characters)
  • AT_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD - Password used to encrypt the database
  • AT_INSTALL_EMBEDDED_HARBOR - Install Embedded Harbor registry, useful for proof of concept/testing purposes

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