Which Products Do I Have Installed From The vCloud Suite?

This was a question I received this morning on how to programmatically identify which products have been installed from the VMware vCloud Suite in a given environment. There are a variety of use cases where this information can come in handy such as software audits, information for third party application/integrators or documentation to just name a few. This information is provided through vCenter Server and the vSphere API using the ExtensionManager which is responsible for both VMware and third party solutions.

Within the ExtensionManager, there is a property called extensionList which contains a list of registered extensions. To identify all VMware specific solutions, we can take a look at the extension key property and look for keys that begin with “com.vmware.” (the format should follow Java package naming convention). We can then map the key to the specific solution by looking at the summary property.

Disclaimer: These script are provided for informational/educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

To demonstrate what the keys would look like and their associated product mapping, here is a vSphere SDK for Perl called listInstalledvCloudSuiteProducts.pl:

This can also be accomplished using the following PowerCLI snippet of code:

$ServiceInstance = get-view ServiceInstance
$EM = Get-View $ServiceInstance.Content.ExtensionManager
$EM.ExtensionList | Where { $_.SolutionManagerInfo } | Select key, @{N=”Description”;E={$_.Description.Summary}} | Format-List

Here is a few VMware solutions and their respective extension keys that I have identified in my lab:

Note: Not all VMware products register themselves as an extension in vCenter Server and hence you may not see all solutions.

In addition to just listing the extension key and description for a given solution, you can also retrieve other details such as the vendor, version or the hostname or IP Address of a given solution. Here is a quick snippet of what that information would look like:

Label: vCenter Operations Manager
Summary: vCenter Operations Manager extension
Version: 5.0.3.818421
Company: VMware, Inc.
Type:
Key: com.vmware.vcops
Server info:
Admin Email: [email protected] –
Company: VMware, Inc.
Description:
Type: com.vmware.vim.viClientScripts
Url: https://10.24.145.35/vcops-vsphere/viClientConfig.xml

For more details, you can take a look at this blog article here which includes a sample script. If you are interested in building a custom solution and would like to know how to register your extension, please refer to the documentation found here.

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