Search Results for: nested esxi

New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 - Part 1

04.24.2018 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Instant Clone or VMFork (as it is referred internally) has been around for a number of years now. It was initially available as part of vSphere 6.0 with the primary consumer being Horizon View and their just-in-time desktop solution. Although Instant Clone was part of the core vSphere platform, public APIs were not available for external consumption. Many customers were interested in the technology to enable other non-VDI use cases such as Dev/Test, Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) and even Container workloads. Part of the reason for not exposing the API was partially due to the original Instant Clone architecture which has certain limitations and constraints.

In addition, VMware was also interested in getting feedback from customers on how they would like to consume Instant Clone from an Automation standpoint, this was important because the current workflows were also some what complex. This started out with the release of a PowerCLI Instant Clone Extension Fling that provided an abstraction on top of the private APIs. Based on that and other feedback, VMware followed that up by releasing Instant Clone for pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) Fling which gave customers more programmatic access to the private APIs. Both Flings were a huge success and we even had customers using the pyvmomi Instant Clone modules in Production to deploy several hundred Instant Clone VMs per day for their CI/CD workloads.

Taking the learnings from both Horizon View and the feedback from customers using the Flings, the Instant Clone Product/Engineering team has been hard at work behind the scenes on simplifying the Instant Clone architecture and removing limitations and constraints that had existed in earlier versions. As you can imagine, this was a non-trivial amount of work that would need to be released in phases, especially as VM lifecycle management touches almost every part of the vSphere stack. The team really focused on ease of consumption, especially from an Automation standpoint which is how most customers prefer to consume Instant Clone.

[Read more...]

vSphere Content Library PowerCLI community module

07.06.2017 by William Lam // 27 Comments

I was recently doing some work with the vSphere Content Library and I needed to extract some information using the Content Library API. I was hoping there were a few out of the box PowerCLI cmdlets but to my surprise, there was only one cmdlet called Get-ContentLibraryItem which did not get into the level of details that I was looking for, which was on a per-file level rather than item-level. I had also search the web to see if anyone had built any functions and although a few existed, none that did the very basics which was retrieving all libraries, library items and library item files.

UPDATE (05/05/19) - Updated module with a new function for creating a subscribed Content Library, below is an example:

New-SubscribedContentLibrary -LibraryName NestedESXi -DatastoreName vsanDatastore -SubscriptionURL https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json -SubscriptionThumbprint "7a:c4:08:2d:d3:55:56:af:9f:26:43:65:d0:31:99:0b:d2:f3:d8:69" -OnDemand

UPDATE (11/14/17) - I have recently updated the Content Library module to enhance the Get-ContentLibrary function and added several additional functions listed below

Set-ContentLibrary
New-ExtReplicatedContentLibrary
Remove-SubscribedContentLibrary
New-LocalContentLibrary
Remove-LocalContentLibrary
Copy-ContentLibrary

Not having worked with the Content Library APIs before, I figure this would be a good learning opportunity and created a PowerCLI module called ContentLibrary.psm1 which contains the following functions:

Get-ContentLibrary
Get-ContentLibraryItems
Get-ContentLibraryItemFiles

Before you can make use of these functions, make sure to connect to the CIS endpoint of your vCenter Server using the Connect-CisServer cmdlet.

Here is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client showing all available Content Libraries:

Here is an example of retrieving the same information using the following command:

Get-ContentLibrary

Note: You also have the ability to filter for the name of a specific Content Library by using the -LibraryName parameter

Here is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client showing the individual Items within a Content Library:

Here is an example of retrieving the same information using the following command:

Get-ContentLibraryItems -LibraryName Test

Note: You also have the ability to filter for the name of a specific Content Library Item by using the -LibraryItemName parameter

Although the granularity when using the vSphere Web Client is at a Content Library Item, using the Content Library API, you can get additional information on the Item itself which is then composed of a set of files. The following command will allow you to retrieve all Files or you can use -LibraryItemName parameter to filter on a specific Item.

Get-ContentLibraryItemFiles -LibraryName Test -LibraryItemName TinyVM

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!