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How To Run The SilverLining Fling Without Installing It In vCloud Director

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A few weeks back the VMware Lab's team released a cool new fling called SilverLining which allows users to build a simplified user-interface for vCloud Director. This interface can be run from any modern web-browser that supports HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. To access the SilverLining interface, you must first install it on a vCloud Director 5.1 Cell.

From a development or proof of concept perspective, it would be really nice to be able to run SilverLining locally from your desktop and point it to a valid vCloud Director 5.1 instance for testing. Well, this is exactly what Andrea Siviero, a Consulting Architect for VMware discovered while playing around with the SilverLining Fling.

UPDATE: 2/28 - For Safari, you can use open /Applications/Safari.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Disclaimer: The solution described here is specifically for Chrome running on Mac OS X or Windows. I have not looked into equivalent settings for other browsers.

Here are the steps required to make this work:

Step 1 - Download SilverLining and extract the contents to your local desktop

Step 2 - Under Silverlining->js directory, there is a file called main.js that needs to be modified. Add the following right under "$(document).ready(function() {" which should point to the base URL of your vCloud Director instance:

localStorage.server = "https://vcd.primp-industries.com";

Step 3 - Launch Chrome with the additional argument via the command-line and load the index.html in the SilverLining directory:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Note: For Windows version of Chrome just pass in the following either via command-line or shortcut to Chrome.exe -disable-web-security

If everything was successful, you should be able to login to the vCloud Organization of your choice and see all the vApps and Catalogs you have access to!

If you receive the "You are attempting to connect to a system no longer supported" shown in the screenshot below:

You may be pointing to a vCloud Director instance that is using a self-signed certificate and you will need to trust the site before proceeding. To do so, open up a new tab and enter the following URL (substituting your vCloud Director URL):

https://vcd.primip-industries.com/api/versions

Click on the "Proceed Anyway" and then reload the index.html page and you should now be able to login to vCloud Director.

I would like to thank Andrea for sharing this awesome tip! Now you can easily develop and test your own custom interface using the Javascript SDK provided by SilverLining all on your desktop. Best of all, you can now point this to any remote vCloud Director 5.1 instance whether that be private or public!

Exploring the vCloud Networking & Security API Using Ruby

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In my previous article I demonstrated how you can easily use Ruby and the HTTParty Gem to access the vCloud API. As mentioned at the end of the article I also performed a similar exercise for the vCloud Networking and Security API and here is the sample Ruby script I reated called vcns.rb.

Before getting started, you will need to have the following installed on your system:

You will also need to access to a vCloud Networking and Security 5.x environment to use this script.  To begin, create a file called config-vcns.yml which contains the credentials to your vCNS system and will be used to login. Here is what the file should look like the following:

:username: admin
:password: default
:site: https://vcns.primp-industries.com

The script provides the following output:

  • vCNS Configuration
  • vCNS Edge Gateway(s) Details
  • Syslog Service Details
  • HA Service Details
  • Firewall Service Details
  • DNS Service Details
  • SSL-VPN Service Details
  • IPSec Service Details
  • DHCP Service Details
  • NAT Service Details
  • Load Balancer Service Details

Here is a screenshot of running the vcns.rb script:

As you can see, you can easily implement any of the features provide from the vCloud Networking and Security API, with some basic knowledge of how the API works (of course the documentation examples help too!). To further demonstrate this, I thought for kicks and giggles, I would take a part of the script and apply it to another language, this time using PowerShell (yep, you heard right!).

Luckily, it turns out my colleague Alan Renouf already wrote an awesome little PowerShell module for vShield (vCNS) awhile back. With some knowledge of the vCNS API, it was trivial to add a new command called get-vShieldEdge which Alan did not have that would list all the vCNS Edge Gateways that have been deployed.

Here is what the the code looks like in Ruby:

Here is what the code looks like for PowerShell:
Minus the language syntax, it looks pretty similar right? Both Ruby and PowerShell are accessing the same vCNS API. As long as you know how the API works, it is pretty easy to switch between programming/scripting languages.

To show the above code works, here is screenshot using the new get-vShieldEdge command:

If you are interested in further automation of vCNS, I would highly recommend you take a look at the vCloud Networking and Security API Programming Guide.

Useful Resources:

Exploring the vCloud API Using Ruby

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While working on something that was completely random, I started to play around a bit with the Ruby programming language. I had a few questions and I reached out to a buddy of mine who is Ruby developer and in doing so I was introduced to a very cool Ruby gem called HTTParty. For those of you who are not familiar with Ruby gems, it is a packaged library or application for Ruby, similar to an rpm or pkg file. The neat thing about HTTParty is that it makes working with REST APIs extremely easy and processing XML request/responses into Ruby objects without too much effort.

With the bit of knowledge I gained from my buddy, I wanted to see how easy it would be to apply this to the vCloud API using Ruby and HTTParty. To my surprise, it was actually pretty easy!

Disclaimer: I am not a developer nor even a Ruby novice. This is probably the second or third time I have used Ruby.

Before getting started, you will need to have the following installed on your system:

The following vCloud APIs are implemented in the sample below:

To demonstrate the use of Ruby & HTTParty, I created a very simple Ruby script called vcd.rb which primarily deals with vApp operations.

To use the script, you will need to create a file called config-vcd.yml which contains the credentials to your vCloud Director instance. Here is what the file should look like:

:username: administrator@system
:password: supersecretpassword
:site: https://vcd.primp-industries.com

Note: This example assumes you are running vCloud Director 5.1 (but sample can be modified to support 1.5)

Here is an example of listing all vApps for the given Organization you are logging into:

Here is an example of listing a specific vApp:

Here is an example of performing several operations on the vApp:

At the end of this little exercise, I was pretty impressed at how easy it was to work with REST APIs using Ruby and HTTParty. I think the toughest part for me personally was getting used to Ruby's syntax which I was not familiar with. I also extended this exercise to the vCloud Networking and Security REST APIs which I will share in another blog post.

Useful Resources: