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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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Workaround to deploy vSphere Integrated Containers 1.1 OVA using PowerCLI (SHA256 not supported)

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Last week I had noticed several folks were having issues deploying the latest vSphere Integrated Containers (vIC) 1.1 OVA using PowerCLI. The following error message was observed when using the Get-OvfConfiguration cmdlet which is needed before importing an OVF/OVA:

PowerCLI doesn't support SHA256 hash codes in OVF manifest

As you probably have guessed, the issue is that PowerCLI currently does not support the SHA256 hashing algorithm, which the latest vIC OVA was generated with. I suspect this is probably related to the change with OVFTool 4.2 which now defaults to SHA256 which also has some implications on which vSphere UI you can use to import OVF/OVAs which I had written about here. As of today, PowerCLI currently only supports SHA1 and anything greater will not work. I have already reported this to Jake Robinson who is the PM for PowerCLI and hopefully this will get addressed in a future update.

In the meantime, you can deploy vIC using either the vSphere Web Client and/or ESXi Embedded Host Client, both support SHA256. If you wish to Automate the deployment of vIC, the only option right now is to convert the OVA from SHA256 to SHA1. You can easily do this by using OVFTool which is available on all OS platforms. If you already have downloaded the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) ISO, you can even make use of its bundled OVFTool in case you did not want to install OVFTool (You can find it under vcsa/ovftool in extracted ISO).

To convert the hashing algorithm, we just need to pass in our desire hash to the --shaAlgorithm parameter.

ovftool.exe --shaAlgorithm=SHA1 C:\Users\primp\Desktop\vic-v1.1.1_56a309fb.ova C:\Users\primp\Desktop\vic-v1.1.1_56a309fb-SHA1.ova

Once the conversion is done, you can delete the original vIC OVA and then use PowerCLI to import the new OVA just like you would with any other OVF/OVA!

How to move vSAN Datastore into a Folder?

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A question came up the other day from a customer that wanted to move a vSAN-based datastore into a vSphere Folder, but was having some trouble with this operation. vSphere Folders are commonly used by administrators for organizational purposes and/or permission delegation. When the customer tried to move their vSAN datastore into a folder using the vSphere Web Client (applies to HTML5 Web Client as well), what they found was that nothing happens even though the UI indicates the operation should be possible with the (+) symbol.


I also saw the same behavior described by the customer and was curious if this was a UI only issue or a general limitation. To quickly verify, I decided to perform the operation using the vSphere API instead of the UI. Behind the scenes, the UI simply calls the MoveIntoFolder_Task() vSphere API which allows you to move various vSphere Inventory objects into a vSphere Folder. As many of you know by now, the vSphere APIs can be consumed in variety of "SDKs" or programming/scripting languages which includes PowerCLI. For PowerCLI users, this functionality is further simplified and abstracted away using the Move-Datastore cmdlet which I will be using in our demonstration.

In my setup, I have two vSAN Datastores, one from a vSphere 6.0u3 environment and another from vSphere 6.5. Lets say I want to move the 60u3 datastore to HR folder and 66 datastore to Engineering folder. The following PowerCLI snippet below does exactly that:

Move-Datastore -Datastore (Get-Datastore "vsanDatastore-60u3") -Destination (Get-Folder "HR")
Move-Datastore -Datastore (Get-Datastore "vsanDatastore-66") -Destination (Get-Folder "Engineering")


Using the vSphere API/PowerCLI, the operation looks to have been successful. Lets now going back to our vSphere Web Client and see if the operation actually went through?

Look at that, both our vSAN Datastores is now part of a vSphere Folder! This looks like a UI (Flex/H5) only issue and I have also confirmed that this will be fixed in a future update of vSphere. For now, if you need to move vSAN-based datastores into a vSphere Folder, simply use the vSphere API as a workaround.

Note: I also found that if you need to move the vSAN Datastore back to the Datacenter level, you will also need to invoke that operation using the vSphere API as the UI also prevents this operation.