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OVF Runtime Environment

06.11.2012 by William Lam // 36 Comments

I recently noticed a trend of questions from various users about extracting specific bits of information such as the version of ESXi that's running or the MoRef ID of the VM, all while within the guestOS. I had already written an article about this topic awhile back called How to extract host information from within a VM? but it seems like there is still a continued interest to easily obtain this information about the underlying vSphere infrastructure from within the guestOS.

I came across another method while researching a different topic which is to use the vApp property of a VM called the OVF runtime environment. This is a feature that has been around since the early days of vSphere 4.x, if not earlier which provides a mechanism to retrieve some of this information as well as custom properties. The OVF feature provides users with the capability to pass in any type of metadata information such as application start up parameters, network configuration, password management, etc. directly into the guestOS for flexible guest customization.

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Categories // Automation, OVFTool, vSphere Tags // guestinfo, ovf, ovfenv, vmtoolsd, vmware tools

How to extract host information from within a VM?

01.15.2011 by William Lam // 34 Comments

From time to time, I see this question come up asking how one might be able to extract a certain piece of information from either ESX(i) or the management APIs (vSphere API) from within a virtual machine. The simple answer is you can not, by default the guest operating system has no idea of the underlying hypervisor nor does it have the access to the management APIs. This of course, assumes you are following VMware's best practices in isolated and segregating off your management network from your virtual machine network.

Having said that, there are certain bits of information that you can extract about your ESX(i) host from within the guestOS using some of the utilities that is installed with VMware Tools. The first utility is called VMware Toolbox command which can be found on both UNIX/Linux and Windows systems that have tools installed.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, OVFTool, vSphere Tags // guestinfo, vmtoolsd, vmware tools, vmware-cmd

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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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