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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 8

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In Part 8, we are going to take a look how services are managed in a VCSA or PSC node which is provided by the vCenter Server Lifecycle Management system also referred to internally as vMon. You can interact with the vMon service using either the service-control utility which is only available via SSH or the VAMI APIs which are available remotely. As you probably have guessed, we will be using the VAMI APIs 🙂

VAMI UI Area of Focus

There is not a service view in the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA]:5480) for either the VCSA or PSC. However, this information is available as part of the VAMI information when logged into the vSphere Web Client by navigating to System Configuration->Nodes->Related Objects or System Configuration->Services.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/vmon/service
  • POST /appliance/vmon/service/start
  • POST /appliance/vmon/service/stop

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output

The Get-VAMIService will lists all available services for the given VCSA or PSC node that you are connected to. It provides the exact same output that you would see in the vSphere Web Client such as the name of the service, the current state, the health and whether the service is disabled or configured to start up automatically or manually.


The function also accepts a name parameter if you know the specific service you wish to query, for example here is the syntax for checking the Auto Deploy service which is named rbd:

Get-VAMIService -Name rbd

We can use the Start-VAMISerivce function and given a service name, we can start it as shown in the screenshot below.


Similialy, we can use the Stop-VAMISerivce function and given a service name to stop the service as shown in the screenshot below.

How to forward other VCSA 6.5 logs to remote syslog server?

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As mentioned in my previous article (which I strongly recommend you review before continuing further), the VCSA 6.5 no longer uses syslog-ng as the syslog client and it has been replaced with rsyslog. This means the instructions outlined in my old article here is no longer valid on forwarding logs from a VCSA 6.5 system to a remote syslog server. Luckily, the process to forward logs within VCSA 6.5 is also pretty straight forward using rsyslog.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk. For very large environments, forwarding additional logs can potentially impact the vCenter Server service, so please take caution in the logs you decide on forwarding and test in a lab environment before applying this across your environment.

To help provide a concrete example, I will be using a real world scenario that often comes up from customers on auditing failed vSphere Web Client login success/failures as well as SSO user creation, deletion and password changes. The following two log files provides us with this information which we will forward to our syslog server:

  • /var/log/vmware/sso/ssoAdminServer.log - Auditing SSO logins
  • /var/log/vmware/sso/vmware-identity-sts.log - Auditing SSO user changes

We will be making using of rsyslog Text File Input Module (imfile) which will allow us to process local log files in the VCSA.

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No suitable disk was found when upgrading to ESXi 6.5 on USB?

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I got a question from my buddy Paudie O'Riordan this morning where he was noticing a strange issue while trying to upgrade his ESXi hosts from 6.0 to 6.5 (all on the VMware HCL). Like many of our customers, he runs ESXi on USB device and when he attempted to upgrade using ESXi Scripted Install (Go Automation!), he was surprised to find that his USB device was not being detected.


Interestingly, I had literally just finished answering a similar question on our internal Socialcast forum and I had wondered if Paudie was also seeing the same problem. The issue looks to be related to the new USB Native Driver (vmkusb) that was introduced in ESXi 6.5 where is it is unable to claim the specific USB device.

Although you can disable the USB Native Driver and fall back to the legacy driver as mentioned in this VMware KB 2147650, but because this is happening during the installation/upgrade process, it can get a bit tricky.

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