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Quick Tip - Determining the vCenter Server OS platform (Windows or VCSA) using vSphere API

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The vSphere API is an extensively rich interface for being able to extract all sorts of useful information about your vSphere infrastructure. One useful trick that may come in handy for those requiring to perform operations directly against the vCenter Server guestOS itself is to figure out whether you are connecting to a Windows vCenter Server or the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)? Lets say you wish to automate the deployment of the recently released VSAN 6.0 Health Check Plugin and the process to install the plugin will differ between Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA, so it would be ideal if you can easily distinguish between the two

A simplistic solution would be to quickly test for something that would exist in either Windows or Linux, but what if you wanted to perform these operations using the vSphere API and the Guest Operations API to execute the commands within the guests? Well, luckily the vSphere API actually provides this information when connecting to a vCenter Server API endpoint and you can tell if you are connecting to a Windows vCenter Server or the VCSA.

To determine the guestOS type for the vCenter Server you are connecting to, there is a property called osType which you can query when you first connect. Below is a quick PowerCLI snippet for accessing this property, you can also use a variety of other vSphere SDKs to extract this property.

$server = Connect-VIServer -Server reflex.primp-industries.com

$server.ExtensionData.Content.About

Disconnect-VIServer -Server $server -Confirm:$false

The osType property for the VCSA is linux-x64

vcenter-server-os-platform-0
The osType property for vCenter Server for Windows is win32-x64

vcenter-server-os-platform-1

Using latest PowerActions 1.5.0 to issue VMFS UNMAP API in vSphere 6.0 Web Client

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Last week, the popular PowerActions Fling was updated to version 1.5.0 which now finally adds support for vSphere 6.0. PowerActions is a vSphere Web Client Plugin that allows administrators to easily execute PowerCLI scripts against inventory objects within the vSphere Web Client. This is a very powerful capability that PowerActions is providing and allows users to easily extend new and custom operations that may not be available within the vSphere Web Client. One such example is being able to easily issue a VMFS UNAMP which in vSphere 5.5 was only available through the use of ESXCLI, I actually demonstrated how easy it is to provide this capability using PowerActions which you can read more about here.

With the release of vSphere 6.0, we now have the ability to issue a VMFS UNMAP using the vSphere API which I have blogged about here among other new vSphere 6.0 APIs. Given that PowerActions now supports vSphere 6.0, I figured this would be a good opportunity to take advantage of the new vSphere 6.0 API using the updated version of PowerActions. I have created a new PowerCLI script called Issue UNMAP 2.0 on Datastore.ps1 which now uses the new UnmapVmfsVolumeEx_Task vSphere API to perform the VMFS UNMAP. I have also submitted a new pull request for this example to Alan Renouf's PowerActions Github repository.

Here is a screenshot of my running the new VMFS UNMAP PowerActions operation against one of my vSphere Datastores and you can that it successfully completed in the Recent Tasks bar.

poweractions-vmfs-unmap
In addition to the new VMFS UNAMP operation that can be added as a PowerAction, here are just a few other examples of new vSphere 6.0 capabilities that you can easily extend into a PowerAction:

I am personally excited for the future and potential of PowerActions and I hope to see the PowerActions framework extend beyond just PowerCLI and support other scripting languages. I think this will be a very powerful capability that the vSphere Web Client can offer to our administrators, operators and developers.

Quick Tip - Using ovftool to connect to vCloud Director behind a 2-Factor Authentication portal

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A couple of months back I ran into an issue while trying to upload a couple of files to VMware's internal OneCloud environment which uses vCloud Director. The issue that I encountered was that our OneCloud environment no longer supported basic username/password authentication, which I hoping to automate using ovftool. Instead, it is now front-ended with VMware Application Manager which requires 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) and once authenticated, a SAML token is then passed to vCloud Director which then automatically logs you in.

ovftool-vcloud-director-SAML-authentication-0
The problem with this is that ovftool can not be used to directly login to vCloud Director as it does not have support for 2FA, which makes automating operations against our OneCloud environment pretty difficult. After spending a few days looking for an alternative and not having any luck, my last hope was to reach out to the ovftool developers to see if they had seen this before.

After a few email exchanges, although ovftool does not support 2FA, you can however get this to work using session ticket authetnication which it does support using either the --I:sourceSessionTicket or --l:targetSessionTicket option. To get more details on these options, you can run the following ovftool command:

ovftool --help integration

In order to use this session ticket mechanism to authenticate into a 2FA environment, you must first login manually using a web browser. Once you have successfully logged in, you will need to either use browser developer tool or something like Firebug to record the authenticated vCloud Director cookie which will then be passed to ovftool.

In this example, I am using Chrome and you can find the Developer Tools by going to Options->More Tools->Developer Tools. Next, refresh the webpage so you are able to see the web requests between your browser and vCloud Director. Now navigate to Network->Cookies option and select any one of the requests to the left of the screen such as "amf".

ovftool-vcloud-director-SAML-authentication1
What you will be looking for is the value to the cookie named "vcloud_session_id" which is is the authenticated session that we will use to provide to ovftool. Once you have that value, you can then specify the connection to ovftool using the following:

ovftool --I:targetSessionTicket=[VCLOUD_SESSION_ID_VALUE] vcloud://...

I had known that ovftool supported session based tickets, however I did not realize it could be used to authenticate behind a 2FA solution like VMware Application Manager. For folks interested in using ovftool and session based tickets directly with vSphere, check out this awesome post by my good friend Jake Robinson who demonstrates this using PowerCLI, ovftool and the AcquireCloneTicket() vSphere API method.