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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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How to purge all logs in vRealize Log Insight?

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I had just deployed a new vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) 4.0 instance in my home lab environment to investigate a behavior that I was seeing with another product, non-vRLI related. Due to the nature of the work, I needed to have a pristine vRLI environment each time to study the results. I had already forwarded some logs into vRLI and rather than deploying another instance or re-deploy the current instance, what I really wanted to be able to do is to just wipe all the logs in vRLI but did not see an option within the UI. I also could have used VM snapshots, but was hoping there was a cleaner solution that vRLI provided out of the box.

The next place I looked immediately after was Mr. Log Insight's site aka Steve Flanders blog but there was nothing there about this other than archiving. After a few Google searches, I came across this exact same question on the vRLI Ideas site but sadly there was no solution and it was dated back in 2014. Though Steve makes a good point about just letting the logs rotate out automatically, in my case, this was not an option and I needed a pristine environment.

Being the curious one, I figured there has to be a way, even if it is not officially recommended nor supported. As you probably have guessed, I did find a way but I would caution that you read the disclaimer below before proceeding further. This was something I needed to do in my lab to test a few scenarios that was non-vRLI related, but I needed syslog target, so this is why I am using vRLI 🙂

Disclaimer: This is probably not officially supported nor recommended by VMware. Please use at your own risk. YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR LOGS

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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.