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Uniquely identifying VMs in vSphere Part 3: Enhanced Linked Mode & Cross VC-vMotion

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Back in 2012, I had published two articles which provides details and guidance on how to uniquely identify a Virtual Machine for both a vSphere and/or vCloud Director environment. The primary use case for this information was for customers or partners who have developed their own provisioning solution which requires them to track their VM assets throughout their lifecycle, usually in some sort of configuration management database (CMDB).

Although these articles are almost 5 years old, the content is still very relevant today and I still continue to reference them both with customers, partners and even some of our internal R&D folks. Most recently, I had a question about whether the guidance in these article were still applicable or whether they would be impacted by some of the new VMware technologies and capabilities that had been introduced since writing those articles such as Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) and Cross vCenter vMotion (xVC-vMotion).

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vSphere Content Library PowerCLI community module

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I was recently doing some work with the vSphere Content Library and I needed to extract some information using the Content Library API. I was hoping there were a few out of the box PowerCLI cmdlets but to my surprise, there was only one cmdlet called Get-ContentLibraryItem which did not get into the level of details that I was looking for, which was on a per-file level rather than item-level. I had also search the web to see if anyone had built any functions and although a few existed, none that did the very basics which was retrieving all libraries, library items and library item files.

UPDATE (05/05/19) - Updated module with a new function for creating a subscribed Content Library, below is an example:

New-SubscribedContentLibrary -LibraryName NestedESXi -DatastoreName vsanDatastore -SubscriptionURL https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json -SubscriptionThumbprint "7a:c4:08:2d:d3:55:56:af:9f:26:43:65:d0:31:99:0b:d2:f3:d8:69" -OnDemand

UPDATE (11/14/17) - I have recently updated the Content Library module to enhance the Get-ContentLibrary function and added several additional functions listed below

  • Set-ContentLibrary
  • New-ExtReplicatedContentLibrary
  • Remove-SubscribedContentLibrary
  • New-LocalContentLibrary
  • Remove-LocalContentLibrary
  • Copy-ContentLibrary

Not having worked with the Content Library APIs before, I figure this would be a good learning opportunity and created a PowerCLI module called ContentLibrary.psm1 which contains the following functions:

  • Get-ContentLibrary
  • Get-ContentLibraryItems
  • Get-ContentLibraryItemFiles

Before you can make use of these functions, make sure to connect to the CIS endpoint of your vCenter Server using the Connect-CisServer cmdlet.

Here is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client showing all available Content Libraries:


Here is an example of retrieving the same information using the following command:

Get-ContentLibrary


Note: You also have the ability to filter for the name of a specific Content Library by using the -LibraryName parameter

Here is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client showing the individual Items within a Content Library:


Here is an example of retrieving the same information using the following command:

Get-ContentLibraryItems -LibraryName Test


Note: You also have the ability to filter for the name of a specific Content Library Item by using the -LibraryItemName parameter

Although the granularity when using the vSphere Web Client is at a Content Library Item, using the Content Library API, you can get additional information on the Item itself which is then composed of a set of files. The following command will allow you to retrieve all Files or you can use -LibraryItemName parameter to filter on a specific Item.

Get-ContentLibraryItemFiles -LibraryName Test -LibraryItemName TinyVM

How to convert vSAN RVC commands into PowerCLI and/or other vSphere SDKs?

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A common request that I see come up from our field and customers is getting specific vSAN Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) commands to be made more generally available in other vSphere CLI/SDKs like PowerCLI for example. Funny enough, many folks do not realize that this functionality has been there since vSAN 6.2 and specifically with the release of the vSAN Management APIs which exposes all vSAN functionality programmatically whether you are consuming it from the vSphere Web Client, Embedded Host Client or from RVC. All of these tools have been built using the vSAN Management APIs.

Although we have supported a variety of vSAN Management SDKs (language bindings) since its first release, I will say that PowerCLI consumption of the vSAN Management API has only been made available recently with PowerCLI 6.5.1 and it supports the latest release of vSAN 6.6 and can go all the way back to vSAN 6.2. Even with PowerCLI support, I still continue to see vSAN RVC requests come up time after time and it seems like folks still have not made the connection that RVC is just simply using the vSAN Management API just like UI does.

What is even more interesting is that the source code of RVC can be viewed by anyone to see how each command is implemented and which APIs are being used. RVC is built using rbvmomi (vSphere SDK for Ruby) which provides access to both the vSphere and vSAN Management APIs. Given the number of requests that I have seen, I am going to assume that this is not common knowledge and I figured the best way to show how this work is with a real world example. I decided to take the vsan.check_limits RVC command and create an equilvenet PowerCLI script that uses the vSAN Management API to provide the exact same information.

Note: You will need to know how to use the vSphere/vSAN Management APIs and knowing a little of Ruby can also help. If you are new to vSAN Management APIs, have a look at this blog post on how to get started.

Here is a screenshot of running the vsan.check_limits RVC command:


Here is a screenshot of running the PowerCLI script that I have created:


As you would expect, the data is exactly the same since they both consume the same underlying vSAN Management API.

So, how do we get started?

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