Search Results for: pyvmomi

Quick Tip - How to tell if a VMFS datastore is local or not using new vSphere 5.5 API?

05.27.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I was recently working on a script for a friend that collects some basic information about VMFS based Datastores. While going through the vSphere API 5.5 Reference, I noticed a new property was introduced in vSphere 5.5 API called "local". It looks like we now have a simple way of checking whether a given VMFS Datastore is local or not. In the past, the only semi-reliable method for checking whether a VMFS datastore was local or not was to see if the "multipleHostAccess" property was set to true, which meant it was a shared VMFS. This was not very reliable as it could be a remote VMFS Datastore but only exported to one host so far and the other major caveat is that this property was only available when connecting to a vCenter Server.

To demonstrate this new API property, I have created an example vSphere SDK for Python (pyvmomi) sample called: list_datastore_info.py

Here is a screenshot running the script directly against an ESXi host (you can also connect to vCenter Server as well):

The script also supports a --json|-j output option, here is an example of that:

If you want to be able to format the JSON output in a more friendly manner, you can pipe the string output to python -mjson.tool

VMware VSAN APIs

02.11.2014 by William Lam // 15 Comments

For customers who are currently evaluating VMware VSAN, the vSphere Web Client is the primary interface for managing and configuring VSAN. However, these exact same VSAN operations can also be accessed programmatically from an Automation perspective. Given that I had spent quite a bit of time playing with VSAN in the lab and exploring some of its APIs, I thought it might be useful to share some of the common VSAN operations mapped to their respective APIs.

There are two main categories of operations that you should be aware of when working with VSAN:

VSAN specific operations
VM Storage Policy operations

VSAN Operations

The VSAN specific operations are available as part of the vSphere 5.5 API and the list below are the supported operations:

Enable/Disable VSAN on a vSphere Cluster (automatic claiming):

Use the ReconfigureComputeResource_Task() and set spec->vsanConfig->enabled to either true or false & spec->vsanConfig->defaultConfig->autoClaimStorage to true

Manual Disk Claiming for an ESXi host:

Each ESXi host provides a vsanSystem manager at configManager->vsanSystem which provides the following methods for disk management
- AddDisks_Task()
- InitializeDisks_Task()
- QueryDisksForVsan()
- QueryHostStatus()
- RemoveDisk_Task()
- RemoveDiskMapping_Task()
- UpdateVsan_Task()

Enable VSAN traffic type for a VMkernel interface

Use the ReconfigureComputeResource_Task() and set spec->vsanHostConfigSpec->HostSystem to the ESXi host you wish to configure and spec->vsanHostConfigSpec->networkInfo->port->device to the specific VMkernel interface you wish to enable VSAN traffic type on

Internal VSAN manager for accessing low level CMMDS (Clustering Monitoring, Membership and Directory Services), object & disk management APIs:

Each ESXi host provides a vsanInternalSystem manager at configManager->vsanInternalSystem which provides the following methods for working with the lower level system of VSAN
- QueryCmmds()
- QueryObjectsOnPhysicalVsanDisk()
- QueryPhysicalVsanDisks()
- QueryVsanObjects()

Change the VM Storage Policy for a Virtual Machine Home OR Virtual Machine Home and Virtual Disk:

Use the ReconfigVM_Task() and set spec->vmProfile to the VM Storage Policy ID

Change the VM Storage Policy for Virtual Machine Virtual Disk:

Use the ReconfigVM_Task() and set spec->deviceChange->device to the specif Virtual Disk to be reconfigured and set spec->deviceChange->vmProfile to the VM Storage Policy ID

Enter Maintenance Mode for an ESXi host in a VSAN Cluster:

Use the EnterMaintenanceMode_Task() and set spec->
maintenanceSpec->vsanMode->objectAction to the specific data accessibility mode defined here

Create and Delete directories on a VSAN Datastore:

Use the DatastoreNamespaceManager which provides the following two methods
- CreateDirectory()
- DeleteDirectory()

SPBM

For VM Storage Policies, VSAN leverages the SPBM (Storage Policy Based Management) framework which allows administrators to create policies that define specific storage capabilities such as performance and reliability that can then be applied to a Virtual Machine. The SPBM API is exposed as a separate API endpoint in vCenter Server and will be required if you wish to create additional VM Storage Policy leveraging VSAN storage capabilities.

Query list of available VM Storage Profiles defined:

Use PbmQueryProfile()

Create VM Storage Policy:

Use PbmCreate()

Delete VM Storage Policy:

Use PbmDelete()

Check VM Storage Policy Compliance:

Use PbmCheckCompliance()

Given a Virtual Machine Home or Virtual Disk, provide associated VM Storage Profile:

Use PbmQueryAssociatedEntity()

Given a VM Storage Profile, provide the associated Virtual Machine Home or Virtual Disk:

PbmQueryAssociatedEntity

Use PbmQueryAssociatedProfiles()

PbmQueryAssociatedProfiles

Hopefully this provides a good overview of some of the common VSAN / SPBM operations and their associated API methods. If I have some spare cycles, I may create some sample scripts leveraging some of these API methods. In the meantime, you can check out these RVC (vSphere SDK for Ruby) modules leveraging both VSAN and SPBM APIs here and here.

Additional Resources:

If you wish to evaluate VSAN and its associated APIs, please sign up for the public beta here.
Sign up for a special VSAN event here
VM Storage Policy APIs aka Storage Profile APIs will be available in vSphere 5.5
SPBM (Storage Policy Based Management) MOB in vSphere 5.5

Having some fun with the Marvel Comics API & vSphere SDK for Python

02.10.2014 by William Lam // 2 Comments

As a child of the 80's, I still remember waking up super early on a Saturday morning to watch some of my favorite cartoons including Transformers, GI Joe, Ninja Turtles and many of the Marvel cartoon series. Last week I saw an interesting tweet from our former VMware CTO, Steve Herrod:

It looks like Marvel has just released a Marvel Comics REST API which allows developers to access the entire Marvel Comics Universe and build custom applications and websites with that data. So, you might be wondering what does this have to do with VMware and virtualization? Well, when I heard about this API, I knew I had to find a way to incorporate this into a cool VMware project.

I decided to create a sample vSphere SDK for Python (also known as pyvmomi) script that would allow a user to specify a number of random Marvel Characters to select from the Marvel database and then automatically create dummy VMs based on those names which could be used for testing. There were a variety of VMware SDK's (Perl, Ruby, PowerCLI, Java, etc) that I could have used, but I opted for the vSphere SDK for Python given my Python skills were not very strong. This also gave me a good reason to play around with our Python SDK.

There are a couple of things you will need to setup before you can use the sample script:

Setup a Marvel API key
Install vSphere SDK for Python, you can take a look here.
Download the create_random_marvel_vms.py

Disclaimer: There is not much error handling built into the sample script, please use at your own risk.

You will need to edit the script and replace the following two variables: marvel_public_key & marvel_private_key with the API key after creating an account on Marvel's website. One thing I really like about the Marvel API and I know many other vendors also provide this which is an interactive API tester. This allows a user to explore and execute a particular API requests without writing a single line of code to get a better understanding of the results before one starts to develop their application.

To run the script, you will need to pass in the following parameters:

--host : Name of your vCenter Server (only tested with vCenter)
--user : User to login with
--password : Password for the user
--datastore : Name of the datastore in which VMs will be created in
--count : The number of Dummy VMs to create

Here is an example of running the script:

./create_random_marvel_vms.py --host vcenter --user root --password vmware --datastore mini-local-datastore-1 --count 10

As you can see from the screenshot above I have just created 10 random VMs where each name is a random Marvel character extracted using a GET request on /v1/public/characters. If we head over to our vSphere Web Client, we should now see our 10 newly created VMs which contain 1vCPU and 128MB of memory. To keep things simple, I did not add a vDisk but you can easily tweak the dummy VM configuration based on your requirements.