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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 4

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In Part 4, we are now going to shift our attention to a very important topic which often gets overlooked and is also usually one of the culprits for many infrastructure issues. What am I referring to? Time Synchronization! You would not believe the number of times that I hear about an issue (not always VMware-related) and after looking into it, the issue was because the user did not have proper time synchronization configured or worse, it was not even running at all. I will agree, it is not always the easiest thing to check for and sometimes there may not even be an API to use, which makes it that much more difficult. Lets see how we can verify our time settings using the new VAMI APIs.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/system/time
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/timesync
  • GET /appliance/techpreview/ntp

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


With this function, not only can you verify that you have NTP configured and it is up and running, but you can also easily get the current system time and compare that with the rest of your other infrastructure to ensure the VCSA/PSC is not time drifting. Historically, to be able to retrieve this information, you normally had to login via SSH and run a couple commands on the Shell and just imagine if you needed to do this across all of your vSphere environments?

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 3

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In Part 3, we are going to look at auditing the different ways you can access the VCSA which includes direct console access (TTY1), Direct-Console UI (TTY2), whether the Bash Shell is enabled and remote SSH access. This is especially useful if you need to ensure certain interfaces like SSH is always disabled and you can even create scheduled task that would periodically run the PowerCLI script and generate either an email or some other notification when a particular access interface is enabled when it is not supposed to be.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

We will be retrieving the two access configurations properties shown in the VAMI UI today as well as two additional properties that are not displayed.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/access/consoleui
  • GET /appliance/access/dcui
  • GET /appliance/access/shell
  • GET /appliance/access/ssh

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output


The output is fairly straight forward, just boolean specifying whether each of the access types are either enabled or disabled. To make changes to any of these settings, you just need to use the PUT operation against the specific access endpoint that you wish to enable or disable. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 2

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In Part 2 of this series, we take a look at how to monitor the health of your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) by retrieving some of the health metrics that are exposed by the Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI).

VAMI UI Area of Focus

Regardless if you have an Embedded VCSA, External PSC or External VCSA node, there are four basic health metrics that are shown in the VAMI UI today: overall health of the system, CPU, memory and the last time the health check was performed. If you are running an Embedded VCSA or External VCSA, there is an additional health metric for the vCenter Server Database (VCDB) as shown in the screenshot below. Interestingly, while going through the health APIs, I also found a few more metrics that are currently not displayed in the VAMI UI today. These additional metrics include Swap, Storage and Software packages which can also be useful to monitor, especially on the storage front.

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