Last week, we held our first-ever community town hall over on Slack. Not bad for a first attempt: good turnout, lots of great questions and comments, and participants seemed to enjoy it overall. Thanks again to Alan Renouf, Kyle Ruddy and the rest of their team for trying it out with us.
We’re talking to a number of teams to see when we can schedule the next one. Stay tuned! Have a favorite product team you’d like to ask questions? Leave a comment below, find us on Slack, or tweet us at @vmwarecode – we’ll do our best to make it happen!
Please find the transcript of some of the key questions below, with minor edits for clarity and style.
Summary of questions & answers
Q: How about a method of tying together Windows disks and vSphere disks – it’s a real pain to deal with at the moment when trying to script server builds.
A: Yes, it is a pain. Did you see the scripts available for this already? It gets hard when there are multiple partitions per disk and other OS as well.
Q: Will PowerCLI be joining the others in being open-sourced?
A: Great question! It’s certainly a long-term goal but we have a way to go internally to get to that point.
Q: Any ETA on module auto-loading/discovery for PowerCLI?
A: Can’t give any official dates, but soon!
Q: In PowerCLI, I am using the new abilities to do Linked-Clones for DevOps. Will VMware ever officially release the ability to do Instant Clones?
A: Yes, this is definitely on the short-term roadmap. We need the APIs to be public first.
Q: Are there plans in the work to attach vmk’s to other TCPIP stacks? It can be painful constructing the objects and spec’s.
A: Yeah, clearly this is available in Get-View but agreed it needs to be surfaced up. It’s on the backlog!
Q: For PowerCLI, will VMware ever release a fully supported NSX module?
A: Have you seen PowerNSX? Would love to know what you think of that. We are working closely with the NSX team.
Q: Now that PowerShell is in Linux, when will we be able to run PowerCLI on a Linux box?
A: Yes, check out the PowerCLI Fling and Docker images etc.
Q: Can we hope/expect to see more functionality brought to REST in updates to 6.5, or will it be more along releases?
A: You will see more functionality released via these APIs in future versions.
Q: Are there plans to try and unify all products using the same API approach to reduce the headaches associated with learning all of these different API’s?
A: Our plan is to make all APIs at VMware as easy to use with the tools that developers and admins want to use. More to come on this in the future!
Q: Any ideas if vSphere Replication will get some API support?
A: Wouldn’t that be nice! We’ve been forwarding this to the PM. Can’t comment on his plans for this, though.
Q: For PowerCLI, has VMware put together any packages yet to fully backup vCenter (all configuration settings)? Don’t care about the DB. But having all the backups via PowerCLI would allow for very granular restore of items/settings. I have a version of this I have written myself, but it is not all encompassing, so some things get missed/not restored when you do a full restore/migration.
A: Not as of today (at least that we’re aware of). There is at least one project that’s currently being worked on, though. So, it is certainly on the radar as a known pain point.
Q: Does anyone know of a way to programmatically set Post Power-On Steps under VM Recovery Properties in SRM? I add a command entry for each VM (executed on recovery SRM server) and creating those entries for hundreds of VMs is a big pain.
A: Have you checked the SRM API Guide? Might be in there: https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/srm-api/
Q: Speaking of vCenter alarms… is there any effort to make creation/manipulation of vCenter alarms via PowerCLI easier?
A: Working on getting the APIs made public for this so we can surface it up via PowerCLI.
Q: I’ve got the REST SDK for 6.5. Love it! Do you know if it will work for versions other than 6.5?
A: Content library and tagging work in 6.0, but the rest is exclusive to 6.5. Docs for the 6.0 stuff: https://code.vmware.com/web/sdk/60/vcloudsuite-rest
Q: How long will PowerCLI (officially) support ESXi/vSphere 5.5?
A: As long as ESXi/vSphere 5.5 is supported we will maintain the versions that work with PowerCLI. However, future versions of PowerCLI may not maintain complete backwards compatibility that far.
Q: REST API stuff looks great, honestly. Breath of fresh air! As a PowerShell user, though, I just haven’t been motivated to explore the functionality yet. Any use cases you guys would recommend right now?
A: If you’re happy with PowerCLI and it meets all of your use cases, probably not. It does allow you to more easily consume the API than SOAP and allows for the creation of other language bindings that may not be officially supported such as for Rust, Erlang, etc. As a PowerShell user you are spoiled but if you are building modern applications or looking to use industry REST based tools its worth checking out. “Evolving the vSphere APIs” is a great starting point from the last VMworld.
