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Having some fun with the Marvel Comics API & vSphere SDK for Python

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As a child of the 80's, I still remember waking up super early on a Saturday morning to watch some of my favorite cartoons including Transformers, GI Joe, Ninja Turtles and many of the Marvel cartoon series. Last week I saw an interesting tweet from our former VMware CTO, Steve Herrod:

It looks like Marvel has just released a Marvel Comics REST API which allows developers to access the entire Marvel Comics Universe and build custom applications and websites with that data. So, you might be wondering what does this have to do with VMware and virtualization? Well, when I heard about this API, I knew I had to find a way to incorporate this into a cool VMware project.

I decided to create a sample vSphere SDK for Python (also known as pyvmomi) script that would allow a user to specify a number of random Marvel Characters to select from the Marvel database and then automatically create dummy VMs based on those names which could be used for testing. There were a variety of VMware SDK's (Perl, Ruby, PowerCLI, Java, etc) that I could have used, but I opted for the vSphere SDK for Python given my Python skills were not very strong. This also gave me a good reason to play around with our Python SDK.

There are a couple of things you will need to setup before you can use the sample script:

  1. Setup a Marvel API key
  2. Install vSphere SDK for Python, you can take a look here.
  3. Download the create_random_marvel_vms.py

Disclaimer: There is not much error handling built into the sample script, please use at your own risk.

You will need to edit the script and replace the following two variables: marvel_public_key & marvel_private_key with the API key after creating an account on Marvel's website. One thing I really like about the Marvel API and I know many other vendors also provide this which is an interactive API tester. This allows a user to explore and execute a particular API requests without writing a single line of code to get a better understanding of the results before one starts to develop their application.

To run the script, you will need to pass in the following parameters:

--host : Name of your vCenter Server (only tested with vCenter)
--user : User to login with
--password : Password for the user
--datastore : Name of the datastore in which VMs will be created in
--count : The number of Dummy VMs to create

Here is an example of running the script:

./create_random_marvel_vms.py --host vcenter --user root --password vmware --datastore mini-local-datastore-1 --count 10

As you can see from the screenshot above I have just created 10 random VMs where each name is a random Marvel character extracted using a GET request on /v1/public/characters. If we head over to our vSphere Web Client, we should now see our 10 newly created VMs which contain 1vCPU and 128MB of memory. To keep things simple, I did not add a vDisk but you can easily tweak the dummy VM configuration based on your requirements.

Disclaimer: Data provided by Marvel. © 2014 Marvel

vSphere Web Client Plugin for Custom Attributes

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I just learned about a very cool vSphere Web Client Plugin that was developed by a fellow vExpert, Patrick Haefner who shared this during the South Germany VMUG back in February of last year. The custom vSphere Web Client Plugin allows administrators to view Custom Attributes in the vSphere Web Client which is currently not available today. The Custom Attributes vSphere Web Client is hosted on the VMUG site and you will need to register to access the download page found here.

Disclaimer: This plugin is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

To install the Custom Attributes plugin, you just need to extract the contents of the zip file and you will should see a directory called haif-customfields-ui. You will need to copy this directory to your vCenter Server which is running the vSphere Web Client. This plugin should work on both vSphere 5.1 and 5.5.

For Windows vCenter Server:

  1. Stop the vSphere Web Client service
  2. Copy haif-customfields-ui to C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient\plugin-packages
  3. Start the vSphere Web Client service

For VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance)

  1. Stop the vSphere Web Client service by running /etc/init.d/vsphere-client stop
  2. Copy haif-customfields-ui to /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/plugin-packages
  3. Start the vSphere Web Client service by running /etc/init.d/vsphere-client start

Once the vSphere Web Client has been started, you can now login and for Virtual Machines or ESXi hosts which have Custom Attributes, you should now see a new portlet displaying the Custom Attributes as seen in the screenshot below.

I think this is a really cool plugin and shows how extensible the vSphere Web Client is by leveraging the vSphere Web Client SDK. With a bit of imagination, you can pretty much build anything! Though today Patrick's plugin only allows you to view the Custom Attributes, perhaps if there is enough requests, he may add the ability to modify Custom Attributes. Awesome work Patrick and thanks for sharing it with the community!

Big thanks to Ruediger M. who works as a VMware SE in Germany for sharing this awesome information. This is definitely a plugin I will be installing in my environments 🙂

Quick Tip - How to quickly find the release & build number on VCSA

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I have been spending quite a bit of time in the lab lately (researching, prototyping, breaking things, etc.) and one of the challenges I have is figuring out which environment I am actually logged into. I literally have a dozen VCSA (vCenter Server Appliances) deployed for various testing and I always forget the build and release the system I am currently logged into. A quick way to get this information on your VCSA is to run the following command:

vpxd -v

Note: There is also vpxd.exe for vCenter Server running on Windows which you can also use.

I also noticed in the VCSA 5.1 it used to provide the vCenter Server build and release number when SSH into the host but it looks like this has now changed with the VCSA 5.5 release. I suspect this might be related to some of the security hardening that has been done by VMware on our appliances (which is great) and I assume there maybe an issue by providing the build and version info as part of the SSH banner.

If you wish to re-enable this feature, you can just edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config and specify the banner to point to /etc/ssh/banner which will includes both the release and build information. In any case, if you are in a pinch and need to quickly figure out the version, you can use the command above.