WilliamLam.com

Introduction to the new ESXi Configuration Store CLI (configstorecli)

by // 10 Comments

I was looking into a customer inquiry this morning and found myself looking at the configstorecli, which is an ESXi Shell CLI that enables access to the new ESXi Configuration Store (ConfigStore). The goal of the ConfigStore, initially introduced in ESXi 7.0 Update 1, is to centrally manage all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files. There is actually not much documentation out there for configstorecli, other than this blog post by Duncan and these two VMware KBs (here and here).

While searching online, I ended up clicking Duncan's blog as I figured it probably has the best information and I do recall this topic awhile back on the change in behavior for renaming a standard virtual switch. I started to play with the configstore CLI and what was not immediately clear was how to actually use it, especially identifying some of the parameters it was looking for. I figured I might as well share some of my findings as I explore configstorecli a bit more.

My first observation is that the Config Store is a JSON document store and each configuration is stored as individual JSON documents. Before you can access a specific configuration, you first need to understand the schema. To view the entire schema, run the following command:

configstorecli schema list

Since the output is JSON, you can actually save the contents to a file on your desktop and use any JSON supported tool such as jq to explore further. In the example below, I have loaded an online copy of the configstorecli output from ESXi 7.0 Update 2 using my Chrome browser, which has this JSON Viewer extension installed. The benefit with a visual tool, is that you can easily expand or collapse specific nodes within the JSON document.

[Read more...]

Exploration of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) multi-vCenter Server templating using YTT

by // Leave a Comment

The motivation behind this blog post originates from a really cool blog post by Mike Brown who shared an interesting Telco use case for wanting to running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and centrally managing TKG Workload Clusters, which would run at each individual Edge/Cell Site location.

While reading through Mike's blog post, I noticed one of the steps was to edit the generated YAML from the TKG Management Cluster which would then be used to deploy the individual TKG Workload Clusters. This would need to happen for each new deployment 😮 and of course, this could be very error prone and frustrating for end users. Here is an example of what the YAML file looks like which is over 1K+ lines!

This screams for automation and I had been looking for a reason to try out YTT again, which is a YAML templating tool that is part of the open source project Carvel. Although I had played with YTT before, it did not feel intuitive, especially for a new user who was trying to solve a quick problem. I figured this was my opportunity to take another look at YTT.

After a couple of hours and a lot of trial/error, I ended up with a partial solution and realized that I would not be able to figure this out given there were even more complicated sections within the YAML. I felt the bar to getting started with YTT was still too high and it may not be the right tool for this particular situation. I opted for a quicker solution using sed, which I had experience with before, but I also know that depending on the problem, sed can be just as complex and I also dislike regular expressions  🙂

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Retrieving vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) DVPort ID & Stats using PowerCLI

by // Leave a Comment

I have seen several variations of this question get asked internally on how how to retrieve the DVPort ID and/or Stats on a vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS). Usually the question is prefaced with an example output from an ESXi host like the one show below using a classic CLI called esxcfg-vswitch. As you can see, there are a number of DVPort IDs which are either mapped to a physical NIC on the ESXi host or to a specific VM and its network adapter, if there is more than one.


My usual response for these sort of questions is that yes, it can be programmatically and automatically retrieved without going directly to an ESXi host. The answer is by using the vSphere API and specifically the set of methods provided by the VirtualDistributedSwitch managed object, which will allow users to retrieve all things related to the VDS.

Note: Although PowerCLI does provide some higher level cmdlets for managing VDS and Distributed Virtual Portgroups (DVPG), not everything that is available in VDS API is available through these higher level cmdlets, but that does not mean you can not use PowerCLI to easily retrieve all this additional information.

[Read more...]