WilliamLam.com

Native VCSA bootstrap installer in vSAN 6.6

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Graphic courtesy of Emad Younis

Almost four years ago, I documented a really cool vSAN capability here and here, which demonstrates how to bootstrap a vSAN datastore onto a single ESXi host. This powerful capability, which was by design, enables customers to easily standup new infrastructure including the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in a pure greenfield environment where you only had bare-metal hardware to start with and no existing vCenter Server.

As you can probably guess, I am a huge advocate for this capability and I think it enables some really interesting use cases for being able to quickly and easily stand up a complete vSphere environment without having to rely on an external storage array or playing games with Storage vMotion'ing the VCSA between local VMFS and the vSAN datastore for initial provisioning.

Over time, this vSAN capability has gone mainstream not only from a customer standpoint but also internal to VMware. In fact, the use of this feature has made its way into several VMware implementations including but not limited to VMware Validated Designs (VVD), VxRail, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and even in the upcoming VMware Cloud on AWS. This really goes to show how useful and critical of a feature this has become for standing up brand new VMware infrastructure which runs on top of vSAN. Huge thanks goes out to the original vSAN Architects who had envisioned such use cases and designed vSAN to include this functionality natively within the product and not have to rely or depend on vCenter Server.

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Project USB to SDDC - Part 1

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A couple of weeks back, Alan Renouf and I co-presented at the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCon, here are some great write-ups about the events here and here. We were very honored to have been invited out and to also deliever the closing keynote. Having traveled halfway around the world, we thought it was only fitting to share something really special.

For the last couple of months, we had been working on a small pet project that I personally had been referring to as the "vGhetto SDDC". This was not something we had not shared with anyone before and thought the VMUG UserCon was the perfect venue to demo our new project. For the session, we decided to rename the project/session to USB to SDDC (better ring than the previous title) which might give you a hint on what the project might be about.

The inception for this project really stemmed from the work we did at last years VMworld Hackathon which was another idea that both Alan and I had came up and worked with the VMware Code team to deliver at both VMworld US and Europe. Like all great Automation stories, the motivation for this project was born out of pure laziness. With the huge success of the Hackathon at VMworld US, there was a huge demand for us to also deliver it again at VMworld Europe.

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 10

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In Part 10, we are going to take a look at local user management for the VAMI interface. By default, only the root local user exists but customers have the option of creating additional accounts. In vSphere 6.5, the VAMI has been enhanced to support different roles such as Admin, Operator and SuperAdmin. You can refer to the VAMI documentation on what each of the roles provides.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

There is not a VAMI UI for user management, this is currently only available using the VAMI REST APIs.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/techpreview/localaccounts/user
  • POST /appliance/techpreview/localaccounts/user
  • DELETE /appliance/techpreview/localaccounts/user/{user-id}

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output

To retrieve all VAMI users, use the Get-VAMIUser function. By default, your system will probably only have the root user unless you have already added additional VAMI users.


To create a new user, we will use the New-VAMIUser which requires a few input parameter that should be pretty self explanatory. The role parameter can be one of three values: admin, operator or superAdmin as defined in the VAMI documentation.

Here is an example of creating a new user called lamw:

New-VAMIUser -name lamw -fullname "William Lam" -role "operator" -email "*protected email*" -password "VMware1!"


If we now re-run our Get-VAMIUser command, we should see the new user that we had just created.


To remove a VAMI user, you simply use the Remove-VAMIUser and specify the name of the user you wish to remove. Below is an example of deleting the user we had just created.


One thing to note is that when using the Connect-CisServer cmdlet to interact with the VAMI REST API, it currently does not support connecting with local VAMI users, only SSO users. This is a limitation with the PowerCLI implementation and does not affect direct use of the VAMI REST API or using it through other SDKs. This is something that will be resolved in a future update of PowerCLI, so something to keep in mind as I was scratching my head when trying to use a local user to authenticate.