vSphere API – Page 20

Retrieving statistics for a Distributed Virtual Port using the vSphere API & PowerCLI

06.01.2015 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Over the weekend I received an email from a fellow colleague over in the NSBU who was interested in retrieving statistics on an individual Distributed Virtual Port using the vSphere API and had asked if I had done this before. Although I have written about using the vSphere API to access various properties of a Distributed Virtual Switch (here & here) and migrating from a Virtual Standard Switch (VSS) to Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) and from a VDS back to VSS (here & here), I have not done a whole lot with the vSphere API with regards to individual Distributed Virtual Ports.

Having said that, with the easy to use PowerCLI Distributed Virtual Switch cmdlets being available, it is actually not too difficult to retrieve this information using the vSphere API. For those of you who have not worked with a Distributed Virtual Switch before, to view the statistics of an individual Distributed Virtual Port, you must drill down into a specific Distributed Virtual Portgroup which you can find using either the vSphere Web/C# Client. Below is a screenshot from my vSphere Web Client.

To retrieve information on a Distributed Virtual Port using the vSphere API, you can refer to the DistributedVirtualPort property. Within this object, there is a state property which you can then drill down further to retrieve statistics using the stat property. If you would like to be able to pull other properties as shown in the screenshot, you can use the runtimeInfo property which provides additional information on the Distributed Virtual Port such as connected entity, MAC Address, VLAN ID, state, etc.

The following two PowerCLI VDS cmdlets: Get-VDPortgroup & Get-VDPort will help us retrieve the information we are looking. However, out of the box these cmdlets do not support pulling statistics for a Distributed Virtual Port. To do so, we will need to access the ExtensionData property which will allows us to access the underlying vSphere API from the PowerCLI object.

Below is a simple PowerCLI script which connects to a vCenter Server and retrieves a specific Distributed Virtual Portgroup (dvPg) that we are interested in using the Get-VDPortgroup cmdlet. Once we have the dvPg, we can then identify a specific Distributed Virtual Port (dvP) by using the Get-VDPort and passing in the dvPg from the previous command as well as the specific port by using the -key property. From here, we can then access a few properties from the dvP and most importantly, the statistics which we were originally interested in. In the example below, I am displaying the entire "stat" property, but you can easily filter out the specific stats you care about.

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

# Retrieve a Distributed Portgroup
$vdportgroup = Get-VDPortgroup -Name dv-vlan333

# Retrieve a specific Distributed Virtual Port from the Distributed Portgroup using the "key" property
$vdport = Get-VDPort -VDPortgroup $vdportgroup -Key 4

# Sample Distributed Virtual Port properties
Write-Host "Link Up: " $vdport.ExtensionData.State.RuntimeInfo.Linkup
Write-Host "Connectee: " $vdport.ExtensionData.State.RuntimeInfo.LinkPeer
Write-Host "Runtime MAC Address: " $vdport.ExtensionData.State.RuntimeInfo.macAddress

# Distributed Virtual Port Stats
$vdport.ExtensionData.State.Stats

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

Here is an example of the output from the script above and we can see that Distributed Virtual Port "4" matches to what we see in the vSphere Web Client screenshot.

Configuring per-VMDK IOPS reservations in vSphere 6.0

05.20.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

One of the new features in vSphere 6.0 that was quickly mentioned at the end of Duncan Epping's What's New Storage DRS blog post is the ability to configure an IOPS reservation on a per-VMDK basis which is now integrated with both Storage IO Control (SIOC) and Storage DRS. As Duncan mentioned at the end of his article, this feature is only consumable through the vSphere API and given that, it may not be a feature that is widely known or used. This topic had recently surfaced in an internal thread on how to set the IOPS reservations and below are the details if you wish to leverage this new vSphere 6.0 storage platform capability.

To be able to use this new feature, there are two requirements:

You need to set the IOPS reservation value on an individual VMDK which is under the StorageIOAllocationInfo property of a VMDK called, not surprisingly, reservation.
All ESXi hosts mounting the Datastore must be running vSphere 6.0

To be clear, this reservation property has been around since vSphere 5.5, but had only had support for local datastores. In vSphere 6.0, shared datastores are now supported along with both SIOC and Storage DRS being aware.

To exercise the use of this vSphere API, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called configurePerVMDKIOPS.ps1 (works with both vSphere 5.x & 6.0) which you will need to edit to include your vCenter Server, the name of the VM you wish to set the IOPS reservation along with the VMDK label and IOPS value.

Here is an example output for configuring a VM named Photon with IOPS reservations of 2000 on Hard Disk 1:

I have been told that in the future, the plan is to make this configurable available in the vSphere Web Client. Though, honestly why would anyone want to perform this change across multiple VMs by hand, when you can quickly and efficiently automate this across your environment with a simple script? 😉

Extracting VID, DID & SVID from PCI devices in ESXi using vSphere API

05.18.2015 by William Lam // 3 Comments

From time to time, you may need to collect some hardware related information such as PCI devices found within your ESXi hosts. In the past, you may have gone directly to the ESXi Shell running some of the legacy esxcfg-* commands for extracting things like the PCI device's Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID) and Sub Vendor ID (SVID) which can be used to correlate against VMware's HCL as seen in the screenshot below.

I personally try to stay out of the ESXi Shell if I can help it and prefer to retrieve these things using an API, such as the vSphere API. Historically, I too thought the VID, DID & SVID properties were only available within the ESXi Shell, but they are actually readily available in the vSphere API. You can find all PCI devices under the hardware.pciDevice property of an ESXi host and below are the three variables that map to these properties.

Vendor ID (VID) = vendorId
Device ID (DID) = deviceId
Sub Vendor ID (SVID) = subVendorId

To quickly demonstrate how you can extract this information using the vSphere API which can be done by connecting either directly to an ESXi host or by going to vCenter Server, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called queryHostPCIInfo.ps1.

Here is an example output of running the script against my Mac Mini and we can see details such as the device name, vendor and the respective VID, DID & SVID values.

If there are other properties which you still find yourself going directly to the ESXi Shell, please leave a comment as I know the PM's are interested in these information and is working hard to ensure that all these properties are available through our vSphere API.