Search Results for: Invoke-VMScript

New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 2

04.30.2018 by William Lam // 5 Comments

In the previous article, I provided an overview of the new "Parentless" Instant Clone feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.7 and some of the architectural differences between prior versions of Instant Clone. In this post, I will show you how to use the new Instant Clone feature, which is currently only available with the vSphere API.

There are two important parts when using Instant Clone:

A user defined script which runs within the GuestOS and is responsible for customizing the network identity of the Instant Clone. This script is not just limited to network configurations but can also be used to customize other OS and/or application settings.
The deployment script which runs outside of the GuestOS and instantiates new Instant Clones using the vSphere API. This script is responsible for passing in data (network configuration, OS and/or application settings) to the GuestOS which can then be accessed directly by the user defined script running within each Instant Clone for actual customization.

To demonstrate the use of the Instant Clone API, I will be using PowerCLI and have also created an Instant Clone PowerCLI module called InstantClone.psm1. However, the API is not limited to just PowerCLI and can be consumed using any of the new vSphere 6.7 SDKs. For our example, we will be exercising the creating Instant Clones from a "Frozen" Source VM workflow since that is the most efficient method, especially as you scale to larger number of Instant Clones. For those that wish to experiment with the other workflow of creating Instant Clones from a "Running" Source VM, feel free to take a look at the previous post for the required steps.

For my setup, I will be using an Ubuntu Server 16.04 system as my Source VM and I will create 30 Instant Clones from this system. Each Instant Clone will immediately be available for use and will be fully customized and reachable from a network perspective (e.g. unique IP and MAC Address). Here is a screenshot of one of my deployments to give you an idea of how blazing fast Instant Clone is 🙂

Here is a short video that I just recorded that demos the Instant Clone APIs using PowerCLI (this demo is using an Ubuntu VM configured with 2GB memory where as the original screenshot was 1GB)

Demo of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 from lamw on Vimeo. [Read more...]

Using vSphere Guest Operations API on macOS Guests?

07.05.2017 by William Lam // 2 Comments

I have written a number of articles exploring the usage and some of the cool tricks that the vSphere Guest Operations (GuestOps) feature provides which you can be found here, here, here and here. I have been a huge fan and supporter of GuestOps since the early days where it was formally known as the VIX API. Having used GuestOps across many different GuestOS types including Nested ESXi, I have to admit, I had never tried it against an Apple macOS guests. I recently had a customer reach out who was looking to use the GuestOps API via PowerCLI (Invoke-VMScript) to automate updates against his guestOS templates that span across Windows, Linux and macOS (from 10.7 to latest). The customer was able to get all guestOSes working except for macOS.

Since I had never tried this before, I spun up my Apple Mac Mini which happen to have a macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) guests running. I tried using the vSphere API GuestOps directly to see if this was a PowerCLI and/or API issue. I too ran into issues and after enabling VMware Tools debugging on the guests (which you can find more details below), I found that it hit the following error:

[Jun 28 06:35:42.805] [ debug] [vix] >VixToolsImpersonateUser

[Jun 28 06:35:42.925] [ warning] [vmsvc] Failed to set gid for user root

Reaching out to Engineering regarding the problem, I came to learn that this particular issue was due to a syscall change made by Apple starting with macOS 10.10.3 and newer. Although the change was a positive thing from a security standpoint, it did break the GuestOps functionality. The good news was that this was already resolved with VMware Tools 10.1 or later. When I had initially provisioned the macOS guests, the latest VMware Tools at the time was 9.10.5. After I applied the latest version which is currently 10.1.7, the issue went away and I was able to successfully use the GuestOps API on my macOS guests.

Below are examples of running the system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType command using both the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet as well as the vSphere API and PowerCLI to consume the GuestOps APIs. Both approaches delivers the exact same outcome, the one benefit of using Invoke-VMScript is that if you want to easily return output from a given command, the cmdlet already does the heavy lifting. If you notice in the native vSphere API case, you do not get output but rather just the PID ID. If you want to return the output, you need to first save it into a file and then download the file to your client system, which may not be ideal for interactive usage but it all depends on your use case.

[Read more...]

How to remotely run appliancesh & other shell commands on VCSA w/o requiring SSH?

02.25.2016 by William Lam // 13 Comments

In vSphere 6.0 Update 1, the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has received a significant enhancement to its Virtual Machine Management Interface also known as VAMI for short. As the name suggests, this interface provides basic configuration, monitoring and management capabilities for the Virtual Appliance which can be consumed through either a UI using a web browser or from the appliancesh CLI running within the VCSA Shell.

When talking to customers, they love the fact that the VCSA is harden out of the box and things like SSH are disabled by default. However, one challenge today is that if you need to access the appliancesh interface, SSH still must be enabled or direct console access would be required which is not ideal from an automation as well as from a security standpoint. Although things like SNMP can be configured on the VCSA to help alleviate some of these challenges, it does not solve the problem of having programmatic and remote management access.

VMware Engineering is aware of this request and is working on exposing the VAMI capabilities as an API in a future release of vSphere. In the mean time, not all hope is lost and there is still a solution which does not require you to give up security to be able to operate and manage your VCSA. We can do so by leveraging one of my all time favorite features of the vSphere Platform which is the Guest Operations API which allows you perform guest operations (running commands, transferring files, etc) directly within the guestOS as if you were logged in. Valid guest credentials are still required and once authenticated, the operations are then proxied through VMware Tools. Networking is not even required which makes this a really handy feature for troubleshooting and can even extend into application level provisioning using a single API. I can not stress enough on how cool and underutilized this feature is and it still comes as a surprise when I tell customers that this is actually possible.

Customers can consume the Guest Operations API by consuming it through one of our many supported vSphere SDKs as I have shown here or you can also consume it through PowerCLI using the Invoke-VMSCript cmdlet. To demonstrate the power of the Guest Operations API with the VCSA, I will completely disable all remote access to the VCSA which includes Local Login, Bash Shell and SSH as shown in the screenshot below.

Here is an example of running a simple "echo" command using the vSphere SDK for Perl:

Note: You will notice that there is no output and that is because the standard output must be re-directed to a file and then downloaded back to your client. The PowerCLI's Invoke-VMScript does handle this for you and will return any standand output to the console. For more complex commands, I would recommend creating a script that contains the command and just running the script itself which you can then log locally or into a file.

Here is an example of running the "appliancesh" command using the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet:

Invoke-VMScript -ScriptText "echo 'VMware1!' | appliancesh help pi list
" -vm VCSA-No-SSH -GuestUser root -GuestPassword VMware1!

Here is an example of running the "cmsso-util" command using the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet:

Invoke-VMScript -ScriptText "export VMWARE_VAPI_HOME=/usr/lib/vmware-vapi
export VMWARE_RUN_FIRSTBOOTS=/bin/run-firstboot-scripts
export VMWARE_DATA_DIR=/storage
export VMWARE_INSTALL_PARAMETER=/bin/install-parameter
export VMWARE_LOG_DIR=/var/log
export VMWARE_OPENSSL_BIN=/usr/bin/openssl
export VMWARE_TOMCAT=/opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard/tomcat-7.0.55.A.RELEASE
export VMWARE_RUNTIME_DATA_DIR=/var
export VMWARE_PYTHON_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/site-packages
export VMWARE_TMP_DIR=/var/tmp/vmware
export VMWARE_PERFCHARTS_COMPONENT=perfcharts
export VMWARE_PYTHON_MODULES_HOME=/usr/lib/vmware/site-packages/cis
export VMWARE_JAVA_WRAPPER=/bin/heapsize_wrapper.sh
export VMWARE_COMMON_JARS=/usr/lib/vmware/common-jars
export VMWARE_TCROOT=/opt/vmware/vfabric-tc-server-standard
export VMWARE_PYTHON_BIN=/opt/vmware/bin/python
export VMWARE_CLOUDVM_RAM_SIZE=/usr/sbin/cloudvm-ram-size
export VMWARE_VAPI_CFG_DIR=/etc/vmware/vmware-vapi
export VMWARE_CFG_DIR=/etc/vmware
cmsso-util --help
" -vm VCSA-No-SSH -GuestUser root -GuestPassword VMware1!

Note: The reason the additional "export" commands are required is that certain commands may rely on certain environmental variables to be setup. In the case of the cmsso-util command, there are several VMware environmental variables it uses. I decided to just export them all but you can selectively figure out which ones are truly needed.

As you can see from the examples above, I was able to successfully run both shell commands as well as the appliancesh without requiring SSH and even local login! This methods works whether you are connected to vCenter Server or ESXi host from vSphere API perspective.

UPDATE (06/06/19) - Example joining the VCSA to Active Directory using domainjoin-cli

Invoke-VMScript -ScriptText "echo 'VMware1!' | /opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli join vmware.corp administrator
" -vm VCSA -GuestUser root -GuestPassword VMware1!