I know many of my readers have inquired about VCSIM (vCenter Server Simulator) which was a really useful tool that served a variety of use cases, but unfortunately it had stopped working with the VCSA 6.0 release. VCSIM is another topic that is near and dear to me and it is something I continue to push and advocate for internally at VMware. Earlier this week, I came to learn about a cool new incubation project that Doug MacEachern had been working on for some time now. Doug is an awesome VMware developer working on the vSphere Integrated Containers (vIC) project and he is also well known for his active contributions to both govmomi (vSphere SDK for Go) and govc CLI.
As you can probably guess from the title, the name of the project is called govcsim and it is a vCenter Server and ESXi API based simulator written using govmomi. It creates a vCenter Server model with a datacenter, hosts, cluster, resource pools, networks and a datastore. The naming of the objects is similar to that of the original VCSIM mode that was included with the VCSA. The number of resources can be increased or decreased using the various resource type flags. Resources can also be created and removed using the API. Doug had developed the tool to provide an easy way for their team to test some of the work they are doing with vIC. The tool is still under incubation but continues to received enhancements. In fact, the other day when I had used it for the first time, I had found a couple of issues which Doug resolved immediately.
I got a chance to give govcsim a spin the other day and currently you can connect to it using govmomi, govc, pyvomi (vSphere SDK for Python) or rbvmomi (vSphere SDK for Ruby). It currently does not work with PowerCLI (connects but no inventory), I know this is something Doug is currently looking into. You might also be able to connect using other vSphere SDKs but these are the ones that Doug and I have tried so far.