stumpr Tracker

Re: Perl SDK 6.5 and Vsphere

stumpr — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 14:52:59 GMT

Well, the tags are exposed via the rest api, so you could probably use w/e version you wanted. Just need to construct the rest request.

But the SDKs are backwards compatible. So if you use 6.5, you can target a 6.0 vCenter no issues. Just don't try to access any new 6.5 features against 6.0. You can use a version check if you need to do so across multiple versions of vCenter.

Re: Simple Perl code to get VM parent host

stumpr — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 22:31:07 GMT

You have a MOREF from the runtime.host property, you need another get_view call on it.

my $host = Vim::get_view(mo_ref => $HostRef);

print $host->{name} . "\n";

Re: Retrieve vCenter instance name

stumpr — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:00:47 GMT

You'll need to login. If you are logging in, you also need permissions:

This method might require any of the following privileges depending on where the property fits in the inventory tree.

System.View on the root folder, if this is used to read settings in the "client" subtree.

System.Read on the root folder, if this is used to read all settings or any settings beside those in the "client" subtree.

System.Read on the host, if this is used to read the advanced options for a host configuration.

Re: Retrieve vCenter instance name

stumpr — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:30:51 GMT

You'll want the OptionManager object on the ServiceInstance.

ServiceInstance -> setting ['VirtualCenter.InstanceName']

Re: C# application using vSphere SDK 5.5 fails to retrieve VM's data from VMware ESXi 4

stumpr — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 18:34:37 GMT

It's probably the property: config.service.service[\"vmware-vpxa\"].running. You'll need to request config.service and iterate them yourself to find the key vmware-vpxa.

Re: C# application using vSphere SDK 5.5 fails to retrieve VM's data from VMware ESXi 4

stumpr — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 17:58:04 GMT

It all depends on what properties you're requesting. What properties are you requesting for the non-VM objects?

Re: C# application using vSphere SDK 5.5 fails to retrieve VM's data from VMware ESXi 4

stumpr — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:49:12 GMT

Without digging too deep, you'll get errors if you ask for properties from the property collector that aren't defined in an older version of the SDK. You'll have to write code logic to ask for 4.x properties only, if you ask for properties that weren't added until a later API version, it will error out.

Re: Modify vApp Options from an existing vm

stumpr — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:47:18 GMT

The example you linked is calling into vCloud Director -- I think (I generally work in *nix so PowerCLI isn't on my usual toolset).

I believe you'll want to go to UpdateVAppConfig() in vSphere. If you look at the VAppConfigSpec object, you'll probably want to modify property or ovfSection.

Re: VimException Timeout, Session no longer exist

stumpr — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 17:55:35 GMT

Generally you'd want to use SessionIsActive() on SessionManager, or I *think* CurrentTime() on the ServiceInstance object may do it as well. Some of the property collector calls don't actually trigger a session anti-idle, but SessionIsActive() usually will (I think).

There is also a socket timeout, to prevent sockets from getting flooded out. But any traffic to that socket will keep those from idling out (usually only a problem if you're process is sleeping for long periods of time).

Re: Is there a way to fetch Data Objects properties such as vDS port state in a similar way to the propertyCollector for the Managed Objects

stumpr — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 14:03:37 GMT

I generally haven't seen much of a gain in parallel queries. Usually it's just a DB lookup on the backend and the data transfer (at least for what you're working on) shouldn't be that large.

Criteria isn't deprecated, it's the scope parameter. And that's likely to be around for a long time. Most of the deprecated properties are still available from 2.5 for example. I think the official statement is deprecated is guaranteed for at least 2 releases? But I'm not sure if that's still true (working on old statement).

Re: Is there a way to fetch Data Objects properties such as vDS port state in a similar way to the propertyCollector for the Managed Objects

stumpr — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:37:13 GMT

You won't be able to do so for the data objects, but FetchDVPorts does support criteria. Assuming you have something besides *all* that you care about, that should be more efficient? Are you seeing extremely slow queries for that data?

Re: How do i programtically create a tag category via VIJAVA or vSphere SDK?

stumpr — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:31:03 GMT

I didn't spend enough time on it, just did a few SSL packet captures. It's basically the SOAP API, just they seem to embed some XPATH operations for the tag management inside the content. I honestly recommend just not using vSphere Tags, unless you're really bumping into functionality instead of metadata tagging. You can get the same result with custom values for the most part when looking to just do tag lookups.

It's been something we've raised as an issue several times to the PMs, but it hasn't gotten any traction outside of the vSphere 6.0 REST API (so only PowerCLI support pre-6.0).

Re: PowerCLI vs Perl SDK

stumpr — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 23:11:53 GMT

Yeah, probably have to hop through the host.

my $vm_name = "test_vm_template";
my $vm = Vim::find_entity_view(view_type => 'VirtualMachine', filter => { 'name' => $vm_name });
my $host_ref = $vm->{'runtime'}{'host'};
my $host = Vim::get_view(mo_ref => $host_ref, properties => ['name', 'parent']);
my $compute = Vim::get_view(mo_ref => $host->{'parent'}, properties => ['name', 'resourcePool']);
my $pool = Vim::get_view(mo_ref => $compute->{'resourcePool'}, properties => ['name']);

# Now use $pool as parameter to MarkAsVirtualMachine

I'm doing this completely from the SDK doc, so I'm sure there are typos.

Re: PowerCLI vs Perl SDK

stumpr — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 18:30:52 GMT

So even without any ResourcePools in our vSphere Client UI, there are some default resource pool entities.

You can get it from your virtual machine object with the property 'resourcePool'. That's most likely what the PowerCLI cmdlet is doing, just using the same resource pool the template is current in (template and virtual machines are the same object, it's just a boolean flag).

So, from Perl, assuming you got the resourcePool property from your get_view or find_entity_view calls:

$pool_moref = $vm->{'resourcePool'};

$pool = Vim::get_view(mo_ref => $pool_moref);

# ...

Re: Run Commands in Guest OS

stumpr — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 22:40:24 GMT

I would probably recommend looking at some tooling like Ansible as your first pass at this, the assumption being you may want to do more complicated in-guest operations and potentially stage into some configuration management activity.

However, if are looking to leverage the out-of-band connectivity of the vSphere GuestOperations API (VIX), then you really don't have too many choices.

lamw‌ actually wrote an example of using the GuestOperations API. http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/07/automating-new-integrated-vixguest.html

Re: how to get the uuid of the virtual machine that got deleted from the VM Deleted event

stumpr — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 18:32:09 GMT

Yes, it's deleted. You won't be able to get the UUID unless you saved it prior to the delete. I don't think that UUID information is packed into the data of the delete event, unfortunately.

Re: retrieve datacenter name in vsphere SDK 6.0

stumpr — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 12:49:32 GMT

Which part throws a null pointer?

There's nothing that changed (unless there is a bug in the dotNET version of the SDK) that would impact looking at the first level parent. However, you may have nested folders (not sure if getParent is recursive). Still, I'd expect parent to be the first parent, regardless of type based on what you shown below.

Re: getting esxi information from vm

stumpr — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 11:31:23 GMT

You'll need some identifier from the GuestOS (HW UUID, IP Address). Then you can query for that VM in the vCenter API. Once you have the VM, you can get the current HostSystem of that VM from *runtime.host*.

Re: The object has already been deleted or has not been completely created

stumpr — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:49:50 GMT

Do you mean that you have two processes both deleting the same datastore?

Generally I'd do a Try::Tiny or eval { } block around the call to capture things like that and avoid a runtime error.

Re: vSphere Management SDK url is just blank page

stumpr — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 15:14:33 GMT

As Richardson Porto pointed out, /sdk is the SOAP endpoint. There is also web-ui oriented interface called the mob at /mob.

Overall the API documentation is generic to any of the SDK kits (Python, Perl, dotNet, Java, etc).

For Python, you'll probably want to use pyvmomi: https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi

You'll have to know the utility functions for each SDK (they vary) and there are some quirks between how you instantiate the API objects.