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vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 3: Finding all deployed Platform Services Controller

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In vSphere 6.0, there are a list of recommended topologies which can viewed in VMware KB 2108548. In the event that you need to locate all available Platform Services Controllers in your environment, you have a couple of options depending on type of access you have and the state of your environment (e.g. vSphere Web Client is down). Before taking a look at the solutions, here is a diagram of my vSphere 6.0 lab environment and its configuration: 2 PSCs configured for replication with 2 VCs joined to PSC1 and another VC joined to PSC2.

locate-vcenter-servers-and-platform-service-controllers
Option 1:

The first option to find this information is using the new System Configuration UI which is available in the vSphere 6.0 Web Client. You can quickly view all Nodes and their type as seen in the screenshot below. This would be the quickest and most efficient method if access to the vSphere Web Client is available.

locate-all-psc-servers-0
Option 2:

We can also connect to a new service in vSphere 6.0 known as the Component Manager via its MOB (Managed Object Browser) interface. You will need to open a browser and connect to the following URL and substituting it with the Hostname/IP Address of one of your PSC:

https://psc-01.primp-industries.com/cm/mob/?moid=ServiceManager&method=Search

If you do not know the Hostname/IP Address of your PSC Server, you can always find it by going to the vCenter Server Advanced Settings and searching for pattern "sso.admin" and you will see the address of your PSC Server as seen in the screenshot below.

Screen Shot 2015-03-29 at 2.56.33 PM
Once you have authenticated in, you will need to add the following snippet into the text box:

<searchCriteria>
<serviceType>
<productId>com.vmware.cis</productId>
<typeId>sso:admin</typeId>
</serviceType>
</searchCriteria>

locate-all-psc-servers-1
Note: For programmatic access, please refer to Option 3 for more details.

Next, click on Invoke Method to execute the query and if everything was successful, you should see entries under "serviceEndpoints" for all your PSCs as seen in the screenshot below.

locate-all-psc-servers-2
Option 3:

The final option is to of course retrieve this information programmatically using the new vCloud Suite SDK which is part of the vSphere 6.0 release. There are 6 new SDKs: .Net, Java, Perl, REST, Python & Ruby and you can find more information here. In this example, I will be using the vCloud Suite SDK for Python and using the sample located under the "lookupservice" directory called print_services.py You will need to download and extract the contents of the SDK onto a system that has a Python interpreter installed and below are the instructions for running this particular sample script.

First, you will need to edit a configuration file and provide some details to one of your PSC's

VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/samples/src/sample.cfg

Here is an example of what the file should look like for my environment:

[connection]
lswsdlurl=file:///root/VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/wsdl/lookupservice.wsdl
lssoapurl=https://psc-01.primp-industries.com/lookupservice/sdk
ssousername=*protected email*
ssopassword=VMware1!

Next, change into the following directory:

cd VMware-vCloud-Suite-SDK-Python-6.0.0/client/bin/

Finally, to run the sample script you will need to ensure run_sample.sh (wrapper script) is set to executable and then run the following:

./run_sample.sh ../samples/src/com/vmware/vcloud/suite/sample/lookupservice/print_services.py

If everything was configured successfully, you should see similar output as shown in the screenshot below:
finding-all-deployed-platform-service-controllers-and-vcenter-servers

How to run Nested Mac OS X guest on ESXi VM on top VMware Fusion?

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You might be asking, why would anyone want to do this? Well, luckily this is not a "because you can" type of answer but was it was an interesting solution that one of our VMware Engineers (Darius) had shared with me after helping out on this VMTN Community forum thread.

The user was running VMware Fusion on his physical Mac OS X system and wanted to be able to test OS X Mavericks under ESXi. Not having a physical ESXi host to test with, the next best thing was to run a ESXi VM under VMware Fusion and then run the Mavericks guest on top of that.

Here is a quick diagram of the user setup:

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion0
The issue with just simply doing this is that for a Mac OS X guest to properly run on ESXi, the underlying hardware must be Apple Hardware. The reason for this is not a technical challenges, but rather a legal one per Apple's EULA. The way in which ESXi detects that the underlying hardware is Apple is by checking whether Apple's SMC (System Management Controller) is available.

In the scenario above, the Nested ESXi VM is not automatically passing through the SMC from the physical Mac OS X system and hence the Mac OS X VM at the very top of the stack will not properly function. The solution that Darius found was to add the following two Advanced VM Settings (VMX) entries to the ESXi VM:

smc.present = "TRUE"
smbios.reflectHost = "TRUE"

This will allow the passing of the underlying SMC up into the Nested ESXi VM which will then allow Mac OS X guest VMs to properly function. We can also confirm this by check the Nested ESXi MOB by pointing a browser to the following URL: https://[ESXI-IP]/mob/?moid=ha-host&doPath=hardware

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion3
If you did not add the two entries above, then the smcPresent property would show up as false. In our case, we did add the following two entries and we now run our Mac OS X Guest. Here are a couple of screenshots of performing this on my iMac at home running the same exact configuration:

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion1nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion2
Thanks Darius for sharing this with me and the community! I am sure this will come in handy for anyone wanting to test Mac OS X guests under ESXi but do not have a physical ESXi host and can easily substitute using VMware Fusion.

VMware VSAN APIs

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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):

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:

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:

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:

Create VM Storage Policy:

Delete VM Storage Policy:

Check VM Storage Policy Compliance:

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

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

PbmQueryAssociatedEntity
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: