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Cool Docker Container for VMware Utilities

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Last week during lunch I learned about a cool little project that my colleague Alan Renouf was working on in his spare time at night. He was interested in learning more about Docker and thought the best way to learn about something new was by using it, which is normally how I learn as well. He came up with a nifty idea to create a Docker Image that would house a bunch of useful VMware tools which included several VMware open source projects as well.

UPDATE (11/23/16) - The Docker Container has now been updated with all the latest vSphere 6.5 SDK/CLI/Tools. We also plan to make this new version of the Docker Image available on Docker Hub, so stay tuned for those details shortly.

Some customers in the past have built similar offerings by using a free VMware Appliance called vMA (vSphere Management Assistance). vMA is nothing more than a stripped down version of SLES that has the vSphere CLI (vCLI) pre-installed. In my opinion, vMA is pretty limited and you can not install additional packages without voiding official support. Even if you decide to ignore support and install custom packages, I have often seen this break existing dependencies. When I talk to customers about their use of vMA, most used it because it was just there, but the majority prefer to use their own harden distribution of Linux and install their own admin utilities and packages which may also include non-VMware tools.

I personally have no problem building my own VM appliance that contains the various VMware packages, utilities and scripts that I use on a daily basis. However, not everyone is comfortable with this idea. Wow could this be further simplified and automated? Well, enter vmware-utils a Docker Image that allows you to automatically build a new image that contains some of the most popular and widely used VMware Utilities.

I wanted to enhance the awesome work that Alan had done with couple more VMware open source tools that I thought might be useful to VMware Administrators, which I actually wrote about here in my List of VMware CLIs, SDKS and DevOps Tools article. I have already submitted a pull request for my changes here. If there are other tools or packages you think that are useful and wish to contribute back, feel free to clone the repository and submit a pull request!

The latest vmware-utils now contains the following:

  • vSphere CLI 6.5
  • PowerCLI Core 1.0
  • vSphere Management SDK 6.5
  • vSphere SDK for Perl 6.5
  • vSphere SDK for Ruby (rbvmomi)
  • vSphere SDK for Python (pyvmomi)
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Ruby 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Python 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Perl 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Java 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Ruby 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Python 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Java 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Perl 6.5
  • Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 6.5
  • OVFTool 4.2
  • PowerCLI Community Repository
  • PowerCLI Core Docker Container Samples
  • William Lam's vGhetto Script Repository
  • Pyvmomi Community Samples
  • Docker Client v1.12.3
  • Docker Compose v1.8.1

For those of you who are new to Docker, a great way to quickly get started is by using an awesome tool called boot2docker which allows you to run Docker Containers on either a Windows or Mac OS X system. This also helps remove any barriers if you do not want to setup a Linux machine to get Docker of if you are like me, running on Mac OS X and rather not have to spin up a VM just to use Docker. Below are the steps on getting boot2docker working and building your own vmware-utils Docker Image.

Step 1 - Download the Docker Client for your specific OS (Windows, Linux or Mac OS X)

Step 2 - Take a look at the vmware-utils README, I spent some time updating it to make it more consumable for new users of Docker and follow the "How" section which will have you download the 4 VMware utilities as well as the vmware-utils DockerFile which we will need to build the Docker Container.

Step 3 - Create a directory and place all files into that directory. In this example, I have called the directory "vmware-utils".

vmware-utils-docker-container-0
Step 3 - We are now ready to build our vmware-utils Docker Image. Change into the "vmware-utils" directory that contains the files you downloaded earlier we will need to specify a "tag" for our image as part of the build command. In this example, I have called my image "lamw/vmware-utils" and to start the build process run the following command:

docker build -t lamw/vmware-utils .

Step 4 - The build itself may take some time depending on the speed of your internet connection. You will know when it has successfully completed when it states "Successfully built X" where X will be some unique ID as seen in the screenshot below.

vmware-utils-docker-container-4
Step 5 - Once the Docker Image has finished building, you can then run and connect to the Container by running the following command:

docker run --rm -it lamw/vmware-utils

vmware-utils-docker-container-5
At this point, you are now logged into the vmware-utils Docker Container that you have just built! It contains all the VMware Utilities that I have listed earlier and for more details on what has been installed and the location of the utilities, take a look at the vmware-utils Github documentation. If there are other tools you would like to see, feel free to contribute back by cloning the repository and submitting a pull request. I am definitely looking forward to seeing how this project evolves and providing a more dynamic way of creating a vMA-like experience without the current limitations. Keep up the awesome work Alan!

List of VMware CLIs, SDKs & DevOps Tools

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A frequent question that I get asked from customers and new developers that are looking to get started with VMware Automation is what CLIs (command-line interfaces) or SDKs (programing/scripting specific languages) are available for them to use? I know it is not always easy to find out what is available on the VMware.com website and some times I even have trouble browsing for all the right information as it is located in many different places. I figure it would be helpful not only for myself but also for others if I put together a list of the various VMware CLIs, SDKs and even some of the new DevOps Tools that VMware has been working on that are available to our customers/developers and partners. I have also included a couple of community tools that I think are pretty interesting. If there are others that you think I should add to the list, feel free and leave a comment.

Note: This is by no means a comprehensive list of every single VMware product/toolkit as there are many many more, including gated SDKs specifically for our partner eco-system. For more details on those API/SDKs, be sure to check out the VMware Developer Center.

UPDATE (4/20) - VMware now has an Open Source page on Github http://vmware.github.io/

VMware Cloud Native Apps:

VMware DevOps Tools:

vCloud Air:

vCloud Director:

vSphere:

vRealize Management Suite:

VMware Community Tools:

govmomi (vSphere SDK for Go), govc CLI & Kubernetes on vSphere

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go-sdk-for-vsphere
One of the exciting announcements that was made last week at VMworld was the joint partnership between Docker, Google, Pivotal and VMware. Paul Strong (Office of the CTO) wrote a great blog post Better Together – Containers are a Natural Part of the Software-Defined Data Center where he goes into more details about the partnership. The really neat part of the announcement which I think some people may have missed is that this was more than just an announcement. There are actually active projects currently being worked on, most notably a working prototype for a Kubernetes vSphere Provider.

For those of you who are not familiar with Kubernetes, it is an open-source project that was started by Google which provides Container Cluster Management. You can think of Kubernetes as a placement engine/scheduler for Containers, similar to how vSphere DRS is responsible for scheduling Virtual Machines. The Kubernetes vSphere Provider allows you to run a Kubernetes Cluster on top of a vSphere based infrastructure and provides a platform for scheduling Docker Containers running on top of vSphere.

Kubernetes is completely written in Go (short for Golang), a programming language developed by Google. To be able to easily integrate with Kubernetes, a Go library needed to be written for the vSphere API and hence govmomi was born! Similar to pyvmomi and rbvmomi which are vSphere SDKs for Python and Ruby respectively, govomimi is the vSphere SDK equivalent for Go. The govmomi project is an open source project lead by VMware and you can find the Github repository at https://github.com/vmware/govmomi.

In addition to govmomi, I also learned about a neat little CLI that was built on top of the SDK called govc (currently an Alpha release) which provides a simplified command-line interface to a vSphere environment leveraging govmomi. You can find the source code under the govmomi Github repository https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/tree/master/govc. The Kubernetes vSphere Providers leverages govc to be able to orchestrate the deployment of a Kubernetes Cluster on top of vSphere leveraging the vSphere API.

To use govc, you will need to ensure you have Go 1.2+ installed on your system. Here are the steps on installing Go and govc

Step 1 - Download the latest Go package installer for your OS here and once you have Go installed, you can verify that everything is working by running the following command:

go version

Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 4.00.10 PM
Step 2 - Setup your build environment by running the following commands:

export GOPATH=$HOME/src/go
mkdir -p $GOPATH
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 4.02.17 PM
Step 3 - Check out govc source code by running the following command:

go get github.com/vmware/govmomi/govc

Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 4.03.00 PM
At this point, govc has been installed. You can now connect to either a vCenter Server or ESXi host. The easiest way is to specify the vSphere API endpoint and credentials is by setting a couple of environmental variables, so you do not have to specify it on the command-line.

Step 4 - Run the following command and specify the username, password and either the hostname or IP Address of your vCenter Server or ESXi host:

export GOVC_URL='https://[USERNAME]:[PASSWORD]@[ESXI-OR-VCENTER-HOSTNAME-OR-IP]/sdk'

Step 5 - To verify that everything is working, you can run the following command to query the endpoint you have connected to:

govc about

Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 4.45.06 PM
If everything was successful, you should see some basic information about the vSphere API endpoint you have connected to. In the example above, I am connected to a VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance). The govc CLI is quite similar to RVC with commands broken up into various namespaces. However, one feature that is not there today is the ability to tab complete the commands which is something I just love about RVC!

You can also just run "govc" and it will provide a list of available commands:
Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 4.45.19 PM
You can get more details about each command by specifying --help command, here is an example of the host.info
Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 4.45.58 PM
To get information about one of my ESXi hosts, I need to specify --host.ip option along with the IP:
Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 4.46.20 PM
As you can see from the screenshot above, some basic information is displayed about my ESXi host which is running on a Mac Mini. If you would like to learn more about govc, I highly recommend you check out the govc repository on Github which has additional documentation. You can also file any bugs or feature requests you would like to see on the project page.

At this point you are now ready to proceed to the next steps which is to setup Kuberentes and deploy a Kubernetes Cluster onto your vSphere environment. Unfortunately I ran into a problem while going through the Kubernetes deployment and I did not know where to go next and decided to file a Github issue here. To my surprise, I immediately got a response back from the VMware Engineers who are working on the project. I had a couple of email exchanges with the team to debug the problem. It looks like we found the culprit and I was able to get Kubernetes up and running. There are a couple of minor caveats which I will explain in more detail in Part 2 of this post and walk you through the steps of deploying a Kubernetes Cluster running on top of vSphere.