python

VCF Agentic AI Hub (Code Assist) MCP Server Fling

10.05.2026 by William Lam // 11 Comments

Creating scripts to help automate repetitive tasks or generate reports is a common need for every VMware administrator, and with Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, to name a few, the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered. In fact, when I spoke with attendees at VMware Explore Las Vegas 2026 about their use of coding agents, I saw a dramatic shift compared to the previous year, from maybe 20% to now over 80%!

However, one key challenge you may have experienced when using AI models (LLMs) is that they can still hallucinate and make up a non-existent REST API endpoint or PowerCLI cmdlet. LLMs are designed to always provide an answer, even when that answer may be wrong.

To help address this challenge and provide modern LLMs with the required VCF context for developing scripts and automation, a new Fling has just been released called VCF Agentic AI Hub (VCF-AI), which is delivered as a standalone virtual appliance. VCF-AI includes a VCF Code Assist MCP Server that currently supports code generation for the following VCF SDKs:

VCF PowerCLI
- vCenter Server
- vSAN
- VCF Operations
- SDDC Manager
- NSX
- vSphere Supervisor
- HCX
- SRM
VCF Python SDK
- vCenter Server
- vSAN
- vSAN Data Protection
- VCF Operations
- VCF Installer
- SDDC Manager
- NSX
- vSphere Supervisor
- VCF Operations for Networks
- Log Management
- VCF Fleet and SDDC LCM

VCF-AI includes all the OpenAPI specifications and documentation for the two SDKs, which cover a number of VCF components along with skill files that have been created by VCF Engineering to allow users to easily create automation using their favorite Agentic coding agent.

[Read more...]

New vSAN Management 6.6 API / SDKs / CLIs

04.18.2017 by William Lam // 2 Comments

With all the new awesome capabilities that have been introduced in vSAN 6.6, there is just as much Automation goodness that will be available for our customers to consume to help them easily mange and operate at scale.

vSAN Management 6.6 API

Below are all the new Managed Objects that have been introduced in the new vSAN Management 6.6 API. This does not even cover all the new methods or object types. For the complete list of vSAN 6.6 APIs, be sure to check out the vSAN Management 6.6 API Reference Guide here.

VsanVcsaDeployerSystem – Virtual Center Service Appliance deployment APIs onto vSAN datastore, operating at both vCenter Server and ESXi Host sides
VsanVdsSystem – vSAN system optimized VDS related operations, especially migrations from VSS to VDS
VsanUpdateManager – VIB installation engine operating at vSAN cluster level (optimized for vSAN clusters)
VsanCapabilitySystem – APIs to query vSAN capability, available on both vCenter and ESXi
VsanMassCollector – vSAN system management query API's to access data and managed object properties, operating at a vSAN Cluster level in vCenter Server only
VsanPhoneHomeSystem – vSAN online health related query API, operating at a vSAN Cluster level in vCenter Server only

[Read more...]

Using the vSphere API to remotely generate ESXi performance support bundles

06.14.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

This is a follow-up post from my previous article on how to run a script using a vCenter Alarm action in the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). What I had demonstrated was using a pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) script to be triggered automatically to generate a VMware Support Bundle for all ESXi hosts for a given vSphere Cluster. The one caveat that I had mentioned in the blog post was that the solution slightly differed from the original request which was to create an ESXi performance support bundle. However, the vSphere API only supports the creation of generic VMware Support Bundle which may not be as useful if you are only interested in collecting more granular performance stats for troubleshooting purposes.

After publishing the article, I had thought about the problem a bit more and realized there is still a way to solve the original request. Before going into the solution, I wanted to quickly cover how you can generate an ESXi Performance Support Bundle which can be done either directly in the ESXi Shell using something like the following:

vm-support -p -d 60 -i 5 -w /vmfs/volumes/datastore1

or you can actually use a neat little trick which I had blogged about here back in 2011 where you can simply open a web browser and run the following:

https://esxi-1.primp-industries.com/cgi-bin/vm-support.cgi?performance=true&interval=5&duration=60

Obviously, the first option is not ideal as you would need to SSH (generally disabled for good security practices) to each and every ESXi host and then manually run the command and copy the support bundle off of each system. The second option still requires going to each and every ESXi host, however it does not require ESXi Shell or SSH access. This is still not ideal from an Automation standpoint, especially if these ESXi hosts are already being managed by vCenter Server.

However, the second option is what gave me the lightbulb idea! I had recalled a couple of years back that I had blogged about a way to efficiently transfer files to a vSphere Datastore using the vSphere API. The solution leveraged a neat little vSphere API method called AcquireGenericServiceTicket() which is part of the vCenter Server sessionManager. Using this method, we can request a ticket for a specific file with a one time HTTP request to connect directly to an ESXi host. This means, I can connect to vCenter Server using the vSphere API, retrieve all ESXi hosts from a given vSphere Cluster and request a one time ticket to remotely generate an ESXi performance support bundle and then download it locally to the VCSA (or any other place that you can run the pyvmomi sample).

Download the pyvmomi script: generate_esxi_perf_bundle_from_vsphere_cluster.py

Here is the sample log output when triggering this script from vCenter Alarm in the VCSA:

2016-06-08 19:29:42;INFO;Cluster passed from VC Alarm: Non-VSAN-Cluster
2016-06-08 19:29:42;INFO;Creating directory /storage/log/esxi-support-logs to store support bundle
2016-06-08 19:29:42;INFO;Requesting Session Ticket for 192.168.1.190
2016-06-08 19:29:42;INFO;Waiting for Performance support bundle to be generated on 192.168.1.190 to /storage/log/esxi-support-logs/vmsupport-192.168.1.190.tgz
2016-06-08 19:33:19;INFO;Requesting Session Ticket for 192.168.1.191
2016-06-08 19:33:19;INFO;Waiting for Performance support bundle to be generated on 192.168.1.191 to /storage/log/esxi-support-logs/vmsupport-192.168.1.191.tgz

I have also created a couple more scripts exercising some additional use cases that I think customers may also find useful. Stay tuned for those additional articles later this week.

UPDATE (06/16/16) - There was another question internally asking whether other types of ESXi Support Bundles could also be generated using this method and the answer is yes. You simply just need to specify the types of manifests you would like to collect, such as HungVM for example.

To list the available Manifests and their respective IDs, you can manually perform this operation once by opening browser specifying the following URL:

https://192.168.1.149/cgi-bin/vm-support.cgi?listmanifests=true

To list the available Groups and their respective IDs, you can specify the following URL:

https://192.168.1.149/cgi-bin/vm-support.cgi?listgroups=true

Here is an example URL constructed using some of these params:

https://192.168.1.149/cgi-bin/vm-support.cgi?manifests=HungVM:Coredump_VM%20HungVM:Suspend_VM&groups=Fault%20Hardware%20Logs%20Network%20Storage%20System%20Userworld%20Virtual&vm=FULL_PATH_TO_VM_VMX

The following VMware KB 2005715 may also be useful as it provides some additional examples on using these additional parameters.