Search Results for: guest operations

Leveraging Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 for extremely fast Nested ESXi provisioning

05.17.2018 by William Lam // 19 Comments

The idea of "Instant Cloning" a Nested ESXi VM (running ESXi in a VM) is not a new concept. In fact, I had shared a solution back in 2015 using the private VMFork APIs. However, what has changed is the ease of consumption, primarily due to the re-architecture of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 (more details here and here) which resulted in a public and simplified API. Some of you might ask, why not simply clone a Nested ESXi VM or create a Link Clone? What benefit would I get by using Instant Clone?

The answer is not only speed, but the fact that the instantiated VM is fully operational and ready to start executing where as a traditional full clone or linked clone requires a full OS boot up that can take up to several minutes to deploy and configure. This may not sound like much for a small number of Nested ESXi VMs, but as you increase the number of instances, Instant Clone really shines while still maintaining speed and the instant availability of the VM. As you can imagine, this definitely opens up for some interesting use cases whether it be for personal home lab or educational purposes like VMware HOL. In addition, we also have customers who deploy Nested ESXi not only at high scale but also with a high churn rate for development purposes, think CI/CD type of a workload who can also benefit from Instant Clone.

So how fast are we talking about? Lets say you wanted to test out the latest version of VSAN in vSphere 6.7, you would normally deploy 3 Nested ESXi VMs, power them up and wait for them to be ready on the network. With Instant Clone, you can deploy three fully functional Nested ESXi VMs in just 30seconds! As the VMs are instantly available for consumption, you can start the VSAN enablement workflow immediately and even parts of that can be baked into the Instant Clone workflow. With the ease of provisioning Nested ESXi VMs, you can simply maintain a catalog of ESXi templates which are in "frozen" states and then leverage Instant Clone to deploy just-in-time Nested ESXi environments and discard them once you are done. Pretty slick if you ask me! and something I plan on using going forward.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is still not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.

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New vSphere 6.7 APIs worth checking out

04.23.2018 by William Lam // 3 Comments

Below are just a few of the new vSphere 6.7 SOAP and REST APIs that have been added or enhanced which I think will be quite useful for customers to be aware of while they start to plan for their vSphere 6.7 upgrades. For a complete list of new vSphere 6.7 (SOAP based) APIs, check out the vSphere 6.7 API Reference Guide which will include a "What's New" section on all the new Managed Objects, Methods, Properties, etc. For a complete list of new vSphere 6.7 REST based APIs, check out vSphere Automation API 6.7 Reference which you can identify new operations and properties which will be marked with "Added in vSphere 6.7".

vSphere 6.7 WebServices (SOAP) API

AlarmManager->ClearTriggeredAlarms() - This method finally provides a way for customers to clear an alarm like you can using the vSphere UI. Historically, customers only had the ability to acknowledge an alarm using the API but not a way to reset alarms.

VirtualMachine->ApplyEvcModeVM_Task() - This method can be used to enable the new Per-VM Enhanced vMotion Capability (EVC) feature that has been introduced in vSphere 6.7

VirtualMachine->InstantClone_Task() - This method simplifies the deployment of new version of Instant Clone that has been added into vSphere 6.7. For more details on how the new Instant Clone feature works, please take a look at this blog post here.

HostNvdimmSystem - This new Managed Object and its respective methods can can be used to manage the new NVDIMM (Persistent Memory) capability that has been added into vSphere 6.7

VirtualMachine->Config->createDate - This new property finally includes the creation date of a VM that has been created in vSphere 6.7 and will be persisted with the lifecycle of the VM itself. I will provide a more detailed blog post on how to consume this new property as well as the expected behaviors, especially around upgrades. I know many of you have been asking for this property and I am glad to see this finally available for all on-premises customers!

VirtualMachine->Flags->vbsEnabled - This new property allows customers to easily enable the new Microsoft Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) feature which was added in vSphere 6.7. This single property (UI/API) behind the scenes actually enables a number of other VM settings required for VBS to properly run such as Virtual Hardware Virtualization (VHV), vIOMMU, EFI Firmware & Secure Boot, which is nice as customers do not have to worry about the underlying settings and simply toggle a simple boolean property.

VirtualMachineGuestOsIdentifier - These are all the new GuestOS Ids that have been added into vSphere 6.7 to enable new GuestOS support, you can find the mapping of the OS type by taking a look at the vSphere API Reference Guide

asianux8_64Guest
centos8_64Guest
darwin17_64Guest
darwin18_64Guest
freebsd11Guest
freebsd11_64Guest
freebsd12Guest
freebsd12_64Guest
oracleLinux8_64Guest
other4xLinux64Guest
other4xLinuxGuest
rhel8_64Guest
sles15_64Guest

vSphere 6.7 REST API

/appliance/backup/schedules - This endpoint provides management and configuration of the new VCSA scheduled backup feature

/appliance/backup/system_name - This endpoint allows you to list all existing backups that have been taken for your VCSA

/appliance/local_accounts - This endpoint provides management of all local users

/appliance/local_accounts/policy - This endpoint provides global password policy management for all local users

/appliance/logging/forwarding - This endpoint provides external syslog configuration for the VCSA

/appliance/networking/proxy - This endpoint provides HTTP(S) proxy configurations for the VCSA

/appliance/ntp - This endpoint provides NTP configuration for the VCSA

/vcenter/deployment - This endpoint enables the ability to automate both Install/Upgrade of the Stage2 installer for VCSA/PSC. Stage 1 deployment of the appliance is currently not part of the REST API but can be automated using existing methods such as OVFTool or PowerCLI as an example.

/vcenter/vm/guest/{identity,local_filesystem} - This endpoint provides guestOS details such as the configured OS along with some basic networking (e.g. Hostname and IP Address) which is retrieved as part of the VMware Tools service running inside of the GuestOS. In addition, you can also get visibility into the guest filesystem including capacity and freespace.

/vcenter/vm/storage/policy - This endpoint provides details about the current configured VM Storage Policy for individual VMDKs of a VM

Cheatsheet for the entire VMware AppCatalyst API using cURL

01.22.2016 by William Lam // 1 Comment

There were a few questions recently about the required syntax for specific VMware AppCatalyst operations when consuming the REST API using cURL. I figured I put together a quick "cheatsheet" that contains cuRL examples for the entire VMware AppCatalyst API which not only would it help me in future but could also benefit others. Like many, I also learn by example and having explicit samples to start with is a great way to get familiar with a new technology or product. If you are new to VMware AppCatalyst and would like a quick run down on how to quickly get started, be sure to check out my getting started article here for more details.

While going through the AppCatalyst API, I did find a couple of API operations which had some inconsistencies and did not strictly adhere to the JSON format. Thanks to Roman Tarnvski for providing the solution. I am hopeful that these issues will be resolved in a future update of AppCatalyst as I do like the ease of use of their API. For the majority of the API, the self documentation via the AppCatalyst API Explorer is accurate, which you can see from the screenshot below.

Before you can interact with the AppCatalyst REST API, you will need to start the AppCatalyst Daemon by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst-daemon

Once the AppCatalyst Daemon is running, you can open a new terminal and start working with the REST API via cURL or any other tool of choice.

1. Create a new VM from the default Photon OS VM template:

You technically only need to specify the unique "id" property, but you can also give a display name for the VM by using the "name" property.

curl -d '{"id":"VM1", "name":"MyAppCat-VM1"}' -X POST localhost:8080/api/vms

2. Clone a VM from an existing VM:

Similar to creating a new VM, you also have option of using the "tag" property to associate additional metadata with the VM.

curl -d '{"id":"VM2", "parentid":"VM1", "name":"MyAppCat-VM2", "tag":"Development"}' -X POST localhost:8080/api/vms

3. List all VMs

curl -X GET localhost:8080/api/vms

4. Get a specific VM:

To retrieve a specific VM, you will need to power on the VM before this operation is allowed. I did find it strange that this was the case, but perhaps this could be enhanced in the future to not have this requirement, especially if you want to pull out details such as the "tag" property.

curl -X GET localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1

5. Power On a VM:

curl -d 'on' -X PATCH localhost:8080/api/vms/power/VM1

Note: Other VM Power Operations: off, shutdown, suspend, pause & unpause

6. Get the power state of a VM:

curl -X GET localhost:8080/api/vms/power/VM1

7. Get the IP Address of a VM:

curl -X GET localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1/ipaddress

8. Enable folder sharing for a VM:

curl -d "true" -X PATCH localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1/folders

9. Create a shared folder mapping for a VM:

The "guestPath" property is not an absolute path within the guestOS, but rather a logical name. For more details about shared folders in AppCatalyst, please have a look at this article here. Currently there is only one "flags" property with the value of 4 which enables read/write, please refer to the article in the link above for more details about folder sharing in AppCatalyst.

curl -d '{"guestPath":"shared-folder","hostPath":"/Users/wlam/git","flags":4}' -X POST localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1/folders

10. List all shared folders to a VM:

curl -X GET localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1/folders

11. List a specific shared folder for a VM:

curl -X GET localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1/folders/shared-folder

12. Delete a shared folder for a VM:

curl -X DELETE localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1/folders/shared-folder

13. Delete VM:

curl -X DELETE localhost:8080/api/vms/VM1