ruby vsphere console

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

06.27.2017 by William Lam // 1 Comment

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?

[Read more...]

Docker Container for the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC)

11.08.2015 by William Lam // 2 Comments

The Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is an extremely useful tool for vSphere Administrators and has been bundled as part of vCenter Server (Windows and the vCenter Server Appliance) since vSphere 6.0. One feature that is only available in the VCSA's version of RVC is the VSAN Observer which is used to capture and analyze performance statistics for a VSAN environment for troubleshooting purposes.

For customers who are still using the Windows version of vCenter Server and wish to leverage this tool, it is generally recommended that you deploy a standalone VCSA just for the VSAN Observer capability which does not require any additional licensing. Although it only takes 10 minutes or so to setup, having to download and deploy a full blown VCSA to just use the VSAN Observer is definitely not ideal, especially if you are resource constrained in your environment. You also may only need the VSAN Observer for a short amount of time, but it could take you longer to deploy and in a troubleshooting situation, time is of the essence.

I recently came across an internal Socialcast thread and one of the suggestion was why not build a tiny Photon OS VM that already contained RVC? Instead of building a specific Photon OS that was specific to RVC, why not just create a Docker Container for RVC? This also means you could pull down the Docker Container from Photon OS or any other system that has Docker installed. In fact, I had already built a Docker Container for some handy VMware Utilities, it would be simple enough to just have an RVC Docker Container.

The one challenge that I had was that the current RVC github repo does not contain the latest vSphere 6.x changes. The fix was simple, I just copied the latest RVC files from a vSphere 6.0 Update 1 deployment of the VCSA (/opt/vmware/rvc and /usr/bin/rvc) and used that to build my RVC Docker Container which is now hosted on Docker Hub here and includes the Dockerfile in case someone was interested in how I built it.

To use the RVC Docker Container, you just need access to a Linux Container Host, for example VMware Photon OS which can be deployed using an ISO or OVA. For instructions on setting that up, please take a look here which should only take a minute or so. Once logged in, you just need to run the following commands to pull down the RVC Docker Container and to star the container:

docker pull lamw/rvc
docker run --rm -it lamw/rvc

As seen in the screenshot above, once the Docker Container has started, you can then access RVC like you normally would. Below is an quick example of logging into one of my VSAN environments and using RVC to run the VSAN Health Check command.

If you wish to run the VSAN Observer with the live web server, you will need to map the port from the Linux Container Host to the VSAN Observer port which runs on 8010 by default when starting the RVC Docker Container. To keep things simple, I would recommend mapping 80->8010 and you would run the following command:

docker run --rm -it -p 80:8010 lamw/rvc

Once the RVC Docker Container has started, you can then start the VSAN Observer with --run-webserver option and if you connect to the IP Address of your Linux Container Host using a browser, you should see the VSAN Observer Stats UI.

Hopefully this will come in handy for anyone who needs to quickly access RVC.

Automating full configuration of a VSAN Stretched Cluster using RVC

10.23.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks back I had spent some time setting up several VSAN Stretched Clusters in my lab for some testing and although it was extremely easy to setup using the vSphere Web Client, I still prefer to stand up the environment completely automated 🙂

In looking to automate the VSAN Stretched Cluster configuration, I was interested in something that would pretty much work out of the box and not require any additional download or setup. The obvious answer would be to use the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is a really awesome tool that is available as part of vCenter Server included in both Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA.

For those of you who have not used RVC before, I highly recommend you give it a try and you can take a look at this article to see some of the cool features and benefits. I am making use of the RVC script option which I have written about in the past here to perform the VSAN Stretched Configuration. One of the new RVC namespaces that have been introduced in vSphere 6.0 Update 1 is the vsan.stretchedcluster.* commands and the one we are specifically interested in is the vsan.stretchedcluster.config_witness command.

There are a couple of things the script expects from an environment setup, so I will just spend a few minutes covering the pre-reqs and the assumptions before diving into the script. I will assume you already have a vCenter Server deployed and configured with an empty inventory. I also assume you have already deployed at least two ESXi hosts and a VSAN Witness VM that meets all the VSAN pre-reqs like at least one VSAN enabled VMkernel interface and associated disk requirements. Below is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client of the initial environment.

Next, we will need to download the RVC script deploy_stretch_cluster.rb and upload that to your vCenter Server. Before you can execute the script, you will need to edit the script and adjust the variable names based on your environment. Once you have saved the changes, you can then run the RVC script by running the following command:

rvc -s deploy_stretch_cluster.rb [VC-USERNAME]@localhost

Here is a screenshot of running the script on the VCSA using Nested ESXi VMs + VSAN Witness VM for the Stretched Clustering configuration:

If everything executed successfully, you should see a "Task result: success" which signifies that the VSAN Witness VM was successfully added to the VSAN Stretched Cluster. If we now refresh the vSphere Web Client and under the Fault Domains configurations in the VSAN Cluster, we now see both our 2-Node VSAN Cluster and the VSAN Witness VM.

Hopefully this script can also benefit others who are interested in quickly standing up a VSAN Stretched Cluster, especially for evaluation or testing purposes. Enjoy getting your VSAN on!