WilliamLam.com

Early Xmas gift from VMware - pyVmomi (vSphere SDK for Python)

by // 13 Comments

For vSphere customers and partners who use the Python programming/scripting language, Christmas may have just arrived early. I just found today, VMware has published an initial release of their vSphere SDK for Python called pyVmomi on Github this past weekend. A Python-based SDK has always been a very popular feature request among customers and partners that I have spoken with in the past. It looks like VMware Engineering has heard you loud and clear and have been working hard to get this released.

pyVmomi Github Repository:
https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi

pyVmomi Pypi package:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyvmomi

One of the nice things about releasing pyVmomi on Github versus trying to package it with a particular vSphere release is that the larger VMware community can contribute to the project as well as more frequent updates from VMware. This has also been quite successful for another popular VMware SDK called rbvmomi (vSphere SDK for Ruby) which is seeing a huge uptick with RVC (Ruby vSphere Console) which is built on top of rbvmomi and is a great tool for managing and troubleshooting VMware VSAN.

In this first release, you will notice there is a limited amount documentation and samples exercising the various capabilities of vSphere and you will see further enhancements in these areas with future updates. If there are specific things you would like to see or samples that you think would be useful to have or that you have built, feel free to file an issue or send pull requests to the pyVmomi Github.

If you wish to quickly get started, you can install pyVmomi using a variety of methods including pip, easy_install and pypi package. Below are the steps I took to install pyVmomi on my Mac OS X system using pip and git.

Step 1 - Install pyVmomi using pip by running the following command:

sudo pip install pyvmomi

Step 2 - Clone the pyVmomi Github repo to your system using Git by running the following command:

git clone https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi.git

After the above command, you will have a folder called pyVmomi which contains the source code as well as the two sample scripts. You can contribute back if you create additional samples or enhancements to pyVmomi by simply sending a pull requests.

Try the getallvms.py sample run the following command:

python sample/getallvms.py --host mini.primp-industries.com --password [PASS]

To try the poweronvm.py sample run the following command:

python sample/poweronvm.py --host mini.primp-industries.com --password [PASS] --vmname [VM]

Hopefully we will see many more samples from VMware as well as from our customers who will be using the new SDK. If there is anything that is missing or things you would like to see, feel free to file an issue on pyVmomi Github repository.

Auditing vMotion Migrations

by // 3 Comments

I saw an interesting question this week about auditing vMotion events and the number of times a VM has migrated to a particular ESX(i) host for license compliance. You can view this information using the Task/Events in your vCenter Server but you can also extract out the various types of events using the EventManager in the vSphere API. You will be able to go as far back in time as your vCenter Server's database retention policy allows you to. We will be searching for the VmMigratedEvent Event which will include variety of information including the source and destination host for the VM. The destination host will only be populated upon a successful vMotion.

Of course I had to write a script to help automate this, so here is a vSphere SDK for Perl script called getNumberOfvMotions.pl that accepts the name of an existing VM and will return the number of vMotions that has been performed on the VM as well as the list of destination hosts and the number of times it has migrated to those hosts. You will need a system that has the vCLI installed or you can you use vMA.

Note:  If you want to look at past vMotion for a VM that no longer exists, this is still possible, but you will need to parse the "message" within the Event as you can no longer look up that VM object in vCenter.

Here is an example of the script running:

You can easily modify the script to audit all VM's in your environment or just use a simple "for" loop to go through a set of VM's you are interested in, but I will leave that as an exercise for you.