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Record and Replay vSphere Inventory using govc and vcsim 

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Happy New Year! 🥳

I wanted kick off 2021 with something I had just learned about right at the end of 2020 which I think this will be useful going into the new year for a number of different use cases. Back in 2017, I wrote about a new and lighter weight version of the vCenter Simulator (vcsim) which had been developed as part of the govmomi (vSphere SDK for Go) project. Since then, the govmomi project has grown exponentially and is now integral to a number of popular open source projects such as Packer builder for vSphere, Terraform provider for vSphere and Kubernetes Cluster API for vSphere (CAPV) to just name a few.

Govmomi is also heavily used internally by VMware for both development and testing purposes. In fact, it has been used to build a number of new VMware features such as the vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) solution and most recently the vSphere with Tanzu capability that was introduced in vSphere 7.0.

Getting back to vcsim, this has been an invaluable tool for both our VMware developers but also the general VMware community. The ability to "simulate" a mocked vSphere environment with a basic inventory can be extremely useful for learning about the vSphere API and interacting with this endpoint using any vSphere SDK including PowerCLI. For automation folks, this can be useful for designing and creating your scripts in an offline mode before testing it against a real environment. For folks building 3rd party solutions that includes a visual interface, this is an easy way to test out your UI and ensure that there are no issues for large vSphere inventories which can be difficult to validate in a development environment.

Simulating a fake vSphere inventory is great, but it also has its limitations. There are so many unrealized use cases if you could capture a real vSphere inventory and then replay that back using vcsim. Just think about a bug reproduction use case and being able to share a real vSphere inventory with a development or QA team without needing to provide them direct access to the production environment?

In my opinion, this was the missing key feature from the original vcsim. To my surprise, this functionality was actually added to govc/vcsim earlier last year and I was quite happy with its implementation! Let's now take a closer look at how the record and replay functionality of govc/vcsim works.

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Integrating Github Actions with vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS

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I have always been a fan of event-driven automation, the idea where you can automatically trigger a workflow or an operation based on a specific event. In the consumer world, the most popular example is the If This, Then That (IFTTT) service, which I use on a regular basis to automate the sharing of new articles from virtuallyGhetto to different Social Media channels.

For the Enterprise, this is also not a new idea and many folks including myself have been doing this for years in vSphere using vCenter Server Alarms. In fact, one example I still reference on a regular basis is from 2012 where you automatically apply a set of vSphere Security Hardening configurations to a Virtual Machine when a new VM Create Event is published by vCenter.

There are countless more examples of this concept beyond VMware but the general idea is to be able to subscribe to specific events and then automatically do something when a given event occurs. When Github Actions (Beta) was announced last year, I was really interested as I think this could open the door for a ton of interesting possibilities, especially from a VMware perspective around Continuous Integration/Development (CI/CD). I quickly registered for the Beta but did not get access until the start of this year. If you want to know what Github Actions can do, check out some of these demos that have been built by various folks from the community. The really exciting thing about Github Actions is that you can literally execute any workflow as long as you can containerized your business logic within a Docker Container. This means, you can use any language or tool that you are familiar with and make this work with Github Actions, pretty powerful stuff!

It was only recently while working on a personal project, which I hope will make its way to VMworld, that I finally got a chance to dig into Github Actions. I noticed in many of the online Github Action examples, that it included ways to deploy applications and containers to a Public Cloud but there was nothing that I found related to VMware. I figured, this would be a good learning opopournity for myself and I could even learn how to build my own Actions which can be useful for others to use or extend further.

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Running sk8s (Simple Kubernetes) on VMC with an AWS Elastic Load Balancer

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Last week I wrote about a really nifty Virtual Appliance called sk8s which can be used to quickly setup a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster for development and testing purposes. If you have not checked out that article, be sure to give that a read first to get the full context. As mentioned in the previous article, sk8s runs great on any vSphere deployment but it can also run on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which adds an additional capability where an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can automatically be provisioned and configured to front-end the k8s control plane as part of the deployment for external access.

The nice benefit of this is that you only need to configure access to the ELB and not directly to the underlying VMs running within the SDDC, both simplifying the setup but also reducing the need to expose the VMs directly to the internet. The write-up below is similar to that of the previous article, but it does expand into greater detail when deploying to VMC and all the required configuration changes within the VPC using the AWS Console and the Network and Security changes using the VMC Console.

Note: If you decide to use the integrated AWS ELB integration, please be aware that you will be charged for the consumption. For pricing, please see the AWS documentation here.

Prerequisites:

  • Access to the VMC Console and VMC SDDC
  • NSX-T Logical Network with DHCP enabled
  • AWS Access & Secret Key for automatically creating ELB (Optional)
  • govc

Step 1 - Install govc on your local desktop which has access to your VMC vSphere environment. If you have not installed govc, the quickest way is to simply download the latest binary, below is an example of installing the latest MacOS version:

curl -L https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/releases/download/v0.20.0/govc_darwin_amd64.gz | gunzip > /usr/local/bin/govc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/govc

Step 2 - We need to verify a few settings in the AWS Console to ensure that the VPC that is connected to your SDDC is properly configured so that the provisioning of the ELB will be successful.

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