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Quick Tip - Requirements for using Guest Operation APIs (Invoke-VMScript & Copy-VMGuestFile) in VMC

08.02.2018 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Since this question came up again today, I figure it was worth sharing in case others also had trouble using the vSphere Guest Operations API in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), which includes PowerCLI's Invoke-VMScript and Copy-VMGuestFile cmdlet. There are a couple of requirements that you must satisfy both in the GuestOS as well as between your on-prem vSphere environment and VMC.

  1. VMware Tools installed and running, it may seem obvious, but I have had customers trying to use various scripts without realizing this was a requirement. You should also ensure that you are running the latest version of VMware Tools, especially as there bugfixes that may impact Guest Operations APIs.
  2. VPN or Direct Connect (DX) configured between your on-prem vSphere environment and VMC, this is required as you will need access to ESXi hosts which is only available through a VPN or DX
  3. Create a VMC firewall rule to allow access from your on-prem network to VMC's ESXi hosts on port 443 which is used for Guest Operations access including transferring files to and from the GuestOS


The VMC firewall rule is usually the thing that most folks forget about and this simply because for most on-prem environment, access to ESXi over 443 is just sort of a default.

Once you have configured the VMC firewall to allow 443 to ESXi hosts, you will be able to use the Guest Operations API including Invoke-VMScript and Copy-VMGuestFile to a VM running in VMC

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere Tags // copy-vmguestfile, guest operations, invoke-vmscript, PowerCLI, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

Creating a vSphere Content Library directly on Amazon S3

07.26.2018 by William Lam // 5 Comments

A few years back I had blogged about creating your own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library enabling customers to take advantage of different types of storage backing than just vSphere Datastores. The primary requirement was that the content endpoint was accessible over HTTP(s), which meant that a number of solutions could be used from a simple web server like Nginx to an advanced distributed object store like Amazon S3 for example.

The workflow to create a 3rd Party vSphere Content Library on S3 is fairly straight forward, here is high level summary:

  1. Organize the content on a local system (desktop)
  2. Run a python script to index and generate the Content Library metadata
  3. Upload the Content Library to S3


A disadvantage of the above solution is that each time you need to update or remove content, the entire process would have to be repeated again, including re-uploading the changes. Not only was this time consuming from an operational standpoint but now you also needed to also keep a full copy of all the content locally which can be several hundred gigabytes, if not more.

This topic was recently brought back up again by Gilles Chekroun, an SE in our Networking and Security Business Unit who reached out to see if there was a solution to help his customer who was running into this challenge. Over the last couple of weeks, I had been working with both Gilles and Eric Cao (Content Library Engineer) on how we could enhance the existing Python script which indexes and generates the Content Library metadata to also support running directly on Amazon S3 bucket.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere Tags // amazon s3, content library, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

Automation with the VMware Cloud Services Platform (CSP)

07.24.2018 by William Lam // 4 Comments

I was recently doing some work where I needed to access the APIs for the VMware Cloud Services Platform (CSP). As the name suggests, CSP is where customers can manage access, billing and consumption of the various VMware SaaS offerings including VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) and VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension to just name a couple.

CSP also provides a RESTful API (Swagger documentation here) which enables customers and partners to automate all aspects of the CSP UI. Although my use of the CSP API is quite small, I figure it  would useful to share the overall workflow in case others were interested in consuming the full CSP API.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, VMware Cloud on AWS Tags // Cloud Services Platform, CSP, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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