Disable Guest NIC Programmatically?

[JohnCasebolt]

Hi All -

We're using LabManager's SOAP API to power an automated test harness.

One of the tests we are required to implement for the customer requires the simulation of a network outage between two of the guest virtual machines.

I would like to be able to programmatically down a Guest Host's NIC via either the LM API or the VI SDK (or the VI Java API).

After searching through a lot of docs, this community and Internet searches, the closet things I can find are:

1) Delete and Re-add the NIC via something like RemoveVirtualNIC/AddVirtualNIC. Not sure what this will do to the guest's OS - probably cause a bit of trouble.

2) Reconfigure the Virtual NIC with a whacked-out, non-routable IP using UpdateVirtualNIC, then change it back to the "real" IP.

Is there a specific API call to just disable/enable a NIC on a VM?

Thanks In Advance,

John

[admin]

It's doable using the ReconfigVM_Task method. I wouldn't accuse it of being very easy though. You might want to have a look at the VMReconfig.java sample within the SDK.

Alternatively if you're not really committed to a particular development platform you might want to consider the VI Toolkit (for Windows).Once you have that up and running you can disconnect using this code

get-vm vmToModify | get-networkadapter | set-networkadapter -connected:$false

[akutz · Accepted solution]

I also wrote an article for TechTarget in December of last year that

showed how to do just this:

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1284661,00.html.

Here is the VS project mentioned in the article.

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 6:14 PM, c_shanklin

[JohnCasebolt]

Thanks - you guys rock. I'll be cranking this up in Java/Axis early next week, and will post my code.

BTW, I forgot to mention that development is being done on MacOS and deployment on RHEL 5, FWIW.