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Quick Tip - Listing vSphere Global Permissions using PowerShell

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Parsing complex HTML is definitely challenging, even with PowerShell. I had hoped to use the free tier of ChatGPT and their latest 4o model to help build a PowerShell function for HTML parsing, but I kept running into system limits and the AI often misunderstood what I was asking for.

I finally gave in and purchased the $20 subscription so that I could expand on my 2017 blog post about automating vSphere Global Permissions and add support for listing global permissions, which came at a request from a recent user.

It turns out calling the private vSphere Global Permissions API via the vSphere MOB to show all current vSphere Global Permissions is extremely difficult due to the complex HTML that is rendered by the vSphere MOB. In fact, it took 25 iterations before I finally arrived at the solution using ChatGPT's 4o model. In several of the iterations, it ended up going backwards in progress, so that was pretty annoying!

Not sure if this is the new fancy "vibe coding" trend that I had experienced ... 😅

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Updated Dashboard for VMware Community Homelabs using Dashimo

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While working on some data analysis for an internal project, I was looking for a better way to summarize and provide some visualizations of the raw data for better consumption.

I also wanted to automate this process, so that I could easily build reports or dashboards regardless of the frequency of requests and/or dataset size. After a bit of searching, I came across a very awesome PowerShell Module called Dashimo, which builds on top of another PowerShell Module called PSWriteHTML, which provides a framework for creating HTML reports.

After playing around with Dashimo over the weekend and successfully using it for my internal project, I thought I would update the dashboard I provide today for the VMware Community Homelabs Project, where users from our community can submit their VMware Homelab BOM (Build of Materials) that can benefit the broader community.

I really like the simplicity and ease of use that Dashimo provides and the dashboards that you can build are all interactive, so it is not just a static image. For those interested in seeing Dashimo in action or if you want to check out the new dashboard for the VMware Community Homelabs, you can access it at: https://lamw.github.io/homelab/

How to automate adding a license into vCenter Server with custom label? 

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When adding a license key into vCenter Server using the vSphere UI, users have the ability to provide a custom label that is then associated with that specific license key.


This is certainly more useful than the system default label which uses "License N", where N is an incrementing number.

While the majority of license management can be fully automated using the vCenter Server LicenseManager API, adding a license key with a custom label is unfourntately an operation that is currently not possible with the public API.

With that said, there is a way in which you can still automate this operation 🙂

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