VMware Cloud Community
epavser
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-13-2017 04:20 AM

vCloud Director identification from Guest OS

Hi,

Does anybody has any good ideas on how to identify if you are running on (via) vCloud Director from inside Guest OS (Linux in my case) and not just on common vSphere.

If you will poke any sys info related to the hypervisor, BIOS etc you will see just "VMware", "vSphere" etc.

The only good way that I end up with is to put key:value pair inside OVF Environment (vcloud=true), then read it with vmtools from inside VM.

If someone knows any better way please share.

BR,

Pavel

1 Reply
IamTHEvilONE
Immortal
Immortal
‎09-13-2017 06:54 PM

This has come up more than once in the past.

There are certain values you can pull from the OVF environment variables, but I don't recall a nice dynamic way for you to inject those values into the VMs without some automation on top.  It sounds like you've gottent this far.

It's not like you can provision from the vCloud Director portal, and then make some sort of call from inside an isolated tenant network through the host.  That just sounds like some exposure that people may not want to introduce.

Even excluding vCD ... I can't think of a way for VMware Tools tools to pull things like the VM's Managed Object Reference (MoRef / MOID) from vCenter/ESXi.  The OVF/OVA information is strictly limited to configuration info (thin Hostname of the VM, or IPs for NICs).

I think the problem comes down to an appropriate level of isolation between the provider and consumer of the resources.  More of an opening a door aspect, and hopefully no bad info is plugged in there that shouldn't be exposed.

I'm also posting to just be aware if this changes or someone posts a nicer solution ... so I know it exists.