vca-cli and vCloud Director 8.20
14 Apr 2017It’s been a while since my last post and a few things happened since then. Among others, the release of vCloud Director 8.20 for Service Providers. The latest version of vCloud Director is fully supported by vca-cli (vCloud Air Command Line Interface). This post provides several examples of using vca-cli with vCD 8.20 for performing common tasks.
Requisites
To run the examples in this post, you need an account on a vCloud Director 8.20 instance and a machine with Python and PyPi (macOS, Linux or Windows).
Installation
Start by opening a console and install vca-cli:
$ pip install --user vca-cli
That should install the latest version of vca-cli (18 at the time of writing). In this version we added the vcd command alias, so vca-cli can be invoked with using the vca or vcd commands available after the installation.
$ vcd --version
vca-cli version 18 (pyvcloud: 16)
If a previous version of vca-cli is already installed, upgrade to the latest with:
$ pip install --user vca-cli --upgrade
Login
The following command logs the user to a vCloud Director 8.20 instance. The required parameters for the login command are username, password, host and org (organization). Since this is a development vCD instance with self-signed certificates, we need to add the -i (insecure) flag to the login and to every command connecting to that vCD host.
$ vcd -i login usr1 \
--password mysecretpass \
--host vcd.cpsbu.eng.vmware.com \
--org org1
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
User 'usr1' logged in, profile 'oc1'
Password encrypted and saved in local profile. Use --do-not-save-password to disable it.
Using VDC 'o1vdc1', profile 'oc1'
Looking Around
Once we logged in, we can retrieve the details of the current organization:
$ vcd -i org info
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Details for instance:org 'None':'org1', profile 'oc1':
| Type | Name |
|------------+--------------------------------------|
| Org Id | fddeb52e-cdca-4f77-8b7f-ef5f899d604c |
| Org Name | org1 |
| catalog | mycatalog |
| orgNetwork | onet100 |
| vdc | o1vdc1 |
Note: If the -i flag is missing when connecting to a self-signed certificates instance, vca-cli will reply with Not logged in message.
We can take a look at the current organization virtual datacenter:
$ vcd -i vdc info
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Details of Virtual Data Center 'o1vdc1', profile 'oc1':
| Type | Name |
|-------------------+-----------------|
| gateway | gw1 |
| network | onet100 |
| vApp | cnt |
| vAppTemplate | centos-7-x86_64 |
| vdcStorageProfile | * |
Compute capacity:
| Resource | Allocated | Limit | Reserved | Used | Overhead |
|-------------+-------------+---------+------------+--------+------------|
| CPU (MHz) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2000 | 0 |
| Memory (MB) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2048 | 34 |
list the templates in the catalog:
$ vcd -i catalog
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Available catalogs and items in org 'org1', profile 'oc1':
| Catalog | Item |
|-----------+-----------------|
| mycatalog | centos-7-x86_64 |
the virtual machines running:
$ vcd -i vm
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Available VMs in 'o1vdc1', profile 'oc1':
| VM | vApp | Status | IPs | Networks | vCPUs | Memory (GB) | CD/DVD | OS | Owner |
|------+--------+------------+---------------+------------+---------+---------------+----------+-------------------------+---------|
| cnt | cnt | Powered on | 192.168.100.1 | onet100 | 2 | 2 | | CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit) | usr1 |
and the networks configured in the datacenter:
$ vcd -i network
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Available networks in 'o1vdc1', profile 'oc1':
| Name | Mode | Gateway | Netmask | DNS 1 | DNS 2 | Pool IP Range |
|---------+-----------+-----------------+---------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------|
| onet100 | natRouted | 192.168.100.254 | 255.255.255.0 | 192.168.100.254 | | 192.168.100.1-192.168.100.20 |
Using Virtual Machines
To power off a running virtual machine, use the vapp command:
$ vcd -i vapp power-off --vapp cnt
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
| Start Time | Duration | Status |
|---------------------+---------------+----------|
| 2017-04-14 10:26:04 | 0 mins 9 secs | success |
Let’s check the current status:
$ vcd -i vm
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Available VMs in 'o1vdc1', profile 'oc1':
| VM | vApp | Status | IPs | Networks | vCPUs | Memory (GB) | CD/DVD | OS | Owner |
|------+--------+-------------+---------------+------------+---------+---------------+----------+-------------------------+---------|
| cnt | cnt | Powered off | 192.168.100.1 | onet100 | 2 | 2 | | CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit) | usr1 |
It is powered off, we can now power the VM on:
$ vcd -i vapp power-on --vapp cnt
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
| Start Time | Duration | Status |
|---------------------+---------------+----------|
| 2017-04-14 10:27:38 | 0 mins 4 secs | success |
And check its status:
$ vcd -i vm
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised.
Available VMs in 'o1vdc1', profile 'oc1':
| VM | vApp | Status | IPs | Networks | vCPUs | Memory (GB) | CD/DVD | OS | Owner |
|------+--------+------------+---------------+------------+---------+---------------+----------+-------------------------+---------|
| cnt | cnt | Powered on | 192.168.100.1 | onet100 | 2 | 2 | | CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit) | usr1 |
Summary
vca-cli supports the latest vCloud Director version 8.20. In this post I provided some usage examples. In future posts I will cover other aspects of vca-cli with vCloud Director, including some upcoming features. More information about vca-cli can be found in the project wiki and in some of my previous posts.