appcatalyst

VMware Fusion 2017 Tech Preview adds REST API support

07.18.2017 by William Lam // 2 Comments

In case you have not heard the news, the VMware Fusion and Workstation team just released their 2017 Tech Preview releases which you can read more about it here and here. A couple of years back, VMware had released a slimmed down desktop Hypervisor based on VMware Fusion called AppCatalyst which was optimized for developers wanting to run Docker Containers. Although the feedback for AppCatalyst was positive, the large majority of customers preferred to see the AppCatalyst specific features such as the RESTful API to just be included natively within Fusion rather than having a separate product.

Although it could not be said at the time, the feedback was heard loud and clear and the plan was to pull in the AppCatalyst REST API directly into Fusion. With the Fusion 2017 Tech Preview, you will now be able to interact with your Virtual Machines running on Fusion using the new Fusion REST API which also includes some additional new capabilities that was not there with the AppCatalyst REST APIs such as network and port forwarding management.

UPDATE (09/27/17) - VMware Fusion 10 has just officially GA'ed and there have been number of updates and enhancements since the Tech Preview. From an Automation/API standpoint, there have been several major updates that I would like to call out.

First, there are several new command-linen options to the vmrest utility including support for both HTTP and HTTPS API endpoints, credentials are also now supported so you can setup a shared username/password and ensure that only authorized folks can login to the API and lastly, the default port is now also configurable. Along with these widely requested features during the Tech Preview, there is also a nice debugging option while using the Fusion UI for troubleshooting purposes.

Secondly, the Fusion Swagger REST API docs has received a total re-vamp in terms of organization and cleaned up documentation. Below is a screenshot of the Swagger interface for the GA version of Fusion 10 which should make it even easier to consume the REST API.

Getting Started

Step 1 - Once you have installed the Fusion 2017 TP release, you will need to start the REST API endpoint which is provided by /Applications/VMware Fusion Tech Preview.app/Contents/Public/vmrest You can just type vmrest and it should automatically start or if you prefer to run it in the background, just type the following:

vmrest &

Here is screenshot of starting the Fusion REST API endpoint:

Note: The default port for the REST API is 8697

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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

How to update AppCatalyst's default PhotonOS VM template w/Docker 1.9?

12.19.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

For those of you using VMware's free AppCatalyst Hypervisor, you may have noticed that there is currently not a way to update to the latest Docker 1.9 Engine/Client using Photon's package manager, Tiny Dandified YUM (tndf). Although you can manually install Docker 1.9 on any deployed PhotonOS VMs from AppCatalyst, the only issue with that is that all VMs based off of the default PhotonOS template will still be running version 1.8, which means you would need to apply to do this on ever new VM creation.

Not ideal at the moment, but there is a simple fix which is to update the default PhotonOS template with Docker 1.9. We can easily this simply by leveraging AppCatalyst itself to update itself 😉 or rather its default PhotonOS VMDK. Below are the manual steps if you wish to walk through this yourself, but if you rather just run a simple script that will compeltely automate the entire process, just jump straight to the bottom of this article 🙂

Step 1 - Create a new temp PhotonOS VM (in my example, I'm calling it PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9) which we will use to install Docker 1.9. You can do so by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vm create PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9

Step 2 - Power on the temp PhotonOS VM that you just created by running the following command:

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst vmpower on PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9

Step 3 - Retrieve the IP Address of the temp PhotonOS by running the following command (this could take up to a minute or so to display):

/opt/vmware/appcatalyst/bin/appcatalyst guest getip PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9

Step 4 - We can now SSH to the temp PhotonOS by using the IP Address from the previous step. You will need to specify the private key to login to the PhotonOS by running the following command:

ssh -i /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/etc/appcatalyst_insecure_key photon@[IP-ADDRESS]

Step 5 - Now we will download and install Docker 1.9 but before doing so we also need to grab the "tar" utility as it does not seem to be part of the default PhotonOS. Here is a one-liner that will automatically install the tar utility and then perform the download and install of Docker (Thanks to Massimo Re'Ferre for his original install steps, just polishing up his awesomeness). Copy and paste the snippet below which you will run that inside of the PhotonOS:

sudo tdnf -y install tar;curl -O https://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-1.9.1.tgz;tar -zxvf docker-1.9.1.tgz;sudo systemctl stop docker;sudo cp usr/local/bin/docker /usr/bin/docker;sudo systemctl start docker;rm -rf usr/;rm -f docker-1.9.1.tgz;exit

Step 6 - Now that we have our PhotonOS updated with Docker 1.9, we just need to shut it down and replace the VMDK with AppCatalyst's default PhotonOS VMDK. Run the following command to find the name of your temp PhotonOS VMDK.

find "${HOME}/Documents/AppCatalyst/PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9" -name '*.vmdk'

Once you have the VMDK name, you should backup the original AppCatalyst's PhotonOS VMDK by running the following command:

sudo mv /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk.bak

Next, we will copy our temp PhotonOS VMDK to AppCatalyst's default PhotonOS directory and replace its original VMDK by running the following command:

sudo cp ${HOME}/Documents/AppCatalyst/PHOTON-DOCKER-1.9/photon-disk1-cl2.vmdk /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk

Finally, we need to make sure the new VMDK has the correct permissions by running the following command:

sudo chmod 644 /opt/vmware/appcatalyst/photonvm/photon-disk1-cl1.vmdk

Step 7 - At this point, you can verify that your changes were successful by creating a new PhotonOS VM and once logged into the VM, you can run "docker version" to verify that you are now running Docker 1.9 as shown in the screenshot below.

For those those of you who do not wish to go through the manual steps, here is a quick script called update_docker_client_in_appcatalyst.sh which automates this entire process describe in the instructions above. Here is a quick screenshot of a sample execution of the script. I am hoping the Photon team will be updating the tdnf online repo so that you can simple run yum -y update docker in the future.