{"id":69,"date":"2016-07-11T16:43:26","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T14:43:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/room28.it\/?p=69"},"modified":"2016-08-03T12:56:53","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T10:56:53","slug":"use-vmware-perl-sdk-to-manage-a-vsphere-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/2016\/07\/11\/use-vmware-perl-sdk-to-manage-a-vsphere-infrastructure\/","title":{"rendered":"Use VMware Perl SDK to manage a vSphere infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello,<\/p>\n

Here is my first API post on this blog. I used to post some API scripts on OVH forums and I want to use this media to share more of them and show you how easy it is to run scripts on top on VMware infrastructure. I had a chance to present VMware Perl SDK\u00a0and how it helps sysadmin on VMworld a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n

First of all, I’m going to show you how to connect to a vSphere infrastructure and then how to list all your virtual machines. This is a quick introduction but I think it is required to understand how it works.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading and I hope it will be useful for your internal needs.<\/p>\n

Overview<\/h4>\n

I run my scripts on top on a OVH Dedicated Cloud, which is basically a vSphere infrastructure. If you need anything about VMware APIs and SDKs, you can find everything\u00a0here<\/a>. One of the best argument on this Perl SDK is that it can run on Linux box. You can also find a python SDK, but it is less powerful than the perl one, there are a lot of call missing.<\/p>\n

All my scripts will require one connection to a vCenter, so you need to have a login and a password with the rights you need to perform all the operations you want. For this particular use case, “read only” rights are sufficient.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

vSphere infrastructure<\/h4>\n

My infrastructure looks like this in my WebClient :<\/p>\n

\"Capture<\/p>\n

I have 1 datacenter with 2 clusters and several VMs in my inventory. The goal of our first script is just to list all my VMs on my “Prod” cluster.<\/p>\n

Install perl SDK<\/h4>\n

You need a login on myvmware to be able to download Perl SDK (here is the direct link for vSphere 6.0<\/a>). To find it you need to go “All VMware product” and on vSphere download page, you have to go on the “Automation Tools and SDKs”. You’ll find a download link for the vSphere SDK for Perl”. Download the tar.gz archive.<\/p>\n

Untar it and copy paste the entire directory :<\/p>\n

vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib\/lib\/VMware\/share\/VMware<\/pre>\n
in you perl lib directory.<\/p>\n
Hint : to known where you perl lib directory is located :<\/span><\/p>\n
$ perl -e 'print \" @INC\\n\"'<\/pre>\n
So my perl lib directory is :<\/span><\/p>\n
\/usr\/lib\/perl5<\/span><\/pre>\n
To install the VMware SDK for perl, I had to copy the content of the tar.gz I downloaded from myvmware website to this directory\u00a0:<\/span><\/p>\n
$ cp vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib\/lib\/VMware\/share\/VMware \/usr\/lib\/perl5\/<\/pre>\n
The content should look like this :<\/span><\/p>\n
$ ls \/usr\/lib\/perl5\/VMware\/\r\nLookupService.pm VICommon.pm VIExt.pm VIM25Runtime.pm VIM2Runtime.pm VIMRuntime.pm pyexe SSOConnection.pm VICredStore.pm VILib.pm VIM25Stub.pm VIM2Stub.pm VIRuntime.pm<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Connect to vCenter<\/h4>\n
First of all, I need credentials to connect to my vCenter, all calls I’ll do by scripts will be done with this user.<\/p>\n
Hint : create a specific user to use API calls, you’ll be able later to know where actions and connections come from in your vSphere client\u00a0Task\/Event tab.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To connect on vCenter, it requires 3 lines, a server, a username and a password :<\/p>\n
 
Opts::set_option('server', 'pcc-178-33-102-10.ovh.com');\nOpts::set_option('username', 'apiuser');\nOpts::set_option('password', 'XXxxXXxxXX');<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
In my case, my vCenter is my Dedicated Cloud :\u00a0pcc-178-33-102-10.ovh.com. It could be an IP, your on premise vCenter, whatever. Just a vCenter.<\/p>\n
Then, you just have to connect with this :<\/p>\n
 
Util::connect();<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
In a perl script, it looks like :<\/p>\n
 
#!\/usr\/bin\/perl\nuse strict;\nuse Data::Dumper;\n\nuse VMware::VIRuntime;\n\nOpts::set_option('server', 'pcc-178-33-102-10.ovh.com');\nOpts::set_option('username', 'apiuser');\nOpts::set_option('password', 'XXxxXXxxXX');\n\n\nprint "Connecting \\n"; \n\nUtil::connect(); \n\n## Later, we are going to make actions there\n\nUtil::disconnect(); \nprint "Disconnected \\n";<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
Don’t forget to disconnect at the end \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
Listing all VMs in my Prod cluster<\/h4>\n
From there, we can connect to a vCenter, we just need to add on our first script, a few lines to get our VMs.<\/p>\n
Getting an object view in a vCenter<\/h5>\n
First, you need to know how to find an object in a VMware inventory. You will need to use the “find_entity_views” call :<\/p>\n
 
my $DatacenterViews = Vim::find_entity_views(\n    'view_type' => 'Datacenter'\n);\n!$DatacenterViews and die('Failed to get DatacenterViews');<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
With this call you will list all the datacenter you have in your inventory. In a perl script :<\/p>\n
 
#!\/usr\/bin\/perl\nuse strict;\nuse Data::Dumper;\n\nuse VMware::VIRuntime;\n\nOpts::set_option('server', 'pcc-178-33-102-10.ovh.com');\nOpts::set_option('username', 'apiuser');\nOpts::set_option('password', 'XXxxXXxxXX');\n\n\nprint "Connecting \\n"; \n\nUtil::connect(); \n\n\nmy $DatacenterViews = Vim::find_entity_views(\n    'view_type' => 'Datacenter'\n);\n!$DatacenterViews and die('Failed to get DatacenterViews');\n\nprint Dumper $DatacenterViews;\n\nUtil::disconnect(); \nprint "Disconnected \\n";<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
You will dump all Datacenters with all their properties.<\/p>\n
To get only one specific object, you can use the “find_entity_view” call with a filter. In my case, I work on the Datacenter name in my Dedicated Cloud, which is “pcc-178-33-102-10_datacenter114”.<\/p>\n
 
my $DatacenterView = Vim::find_entity_view(\n    'view_type' => 'Datacenter',\n    'filter' => {\n        'name' => 'pcc-178-33-102-10_datacenter114'\n    } \n);\n!$DatacenterView and die('Failed to get DatacenterView');<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
Getting all VMs in my “Prod” cluster<\/h4>\n
Now we understand how filters and search work. We can work on finding all VMs in my cluster.<\/p>\n
We are going to use the “find_entity_views” call and add a filter based on my cluster name.<\/p>\n
First we need to get the view of my “Prod” cluster with the filter we already know.<\/p>\n
 
my $ClusterView\u00a0 = Vim::find_entity_view(\n    'view_type' => 'ClusterComputeResource', \n    'filter'    => { 'name' => 'Prod' } \n);<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
I introduce a new property of the “find_entity_views” method : begin_entity<\/em>.<\/p>\n
If you remember my inventory,\u00a0all my VMs are located under my cluster “Prod” :<\/p>\n
\"Capture<\/p>\n
So I’ll ask to “find_entity_views” to search all VMs under my cluster :<\/p>\n
 
my $VMViews\u00a0 = Vim::find_entity_views(\n    'view_type'\u00a0 \u00a0 => 'VirtualMachine',\n    'begin_entity' => $ClusterView ,\n);<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
Here we are. Here is the full perl script :<\/p>\n
 
#!\/usr\/bin\/perl\nuse strict;\nuse Data::Dumper;\n\nuse VMware::VIRuntime;\n\nOpts::set_option('server', 'pcc-178-33-102-10.ovh.com');\nOpts::set_option('username', 'apiuser');\nOpts::set_option('password', 'XXxxXXxxXX');\n\n\nprint "Connecting \\n"; \n\nUtil::connect();\n\nmy $ClusterView\u00a0 = Vim::find_entity_view(\n    'view_type' => 'ClusterComputeResource', \n    'filter'    => { 'name' => 'Prod' } \n);\n!$ClusterView and die ("Failed to get Cluster");\n\nmy $VMViews\u00a0 = Vim::find_entity_views(\n    'view_type'\u00a0 \u00a0 => 'VirtualMachine',\n    'begin_entity' => $ClusterView,\n);\n!$VMViews and die ("Failed to get VMs");\n\nforeach my $VM (@$VMViews)\n{\n    print $VM->name . "\\n";\n}\n\n\nUtil::disconnect(); \nprint "Disconnected \\n";<\/code><\/pre> 
 <\/div> <\/div>\n
Easy isn’t it ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hello, Here is my first API post on this blog. I used to post some API scripts on OVH forums and I want to use this media to share more of them and show you how easy it is to run scripts on top on VMware infrastructure. I had a chance to present VMware Perl … Continue reading “Use VMware Perl SDK to manage a vSphere infrastructure”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,7,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/room28.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}