New VMWare 8 modes

Hello again.

I forgot to ask also if it’s possible to add the tools-vm mode to VMWare 8 VCenter connector, to have a list of all the machines which have it installed, updated, running, etc, like with the 6/7 plugin.

There is a vm-tools mode for the VMWare 8 VM but that if for the VM specified by name or id.

Regards.

Hello ​@emeck 

Thanks for these suggestions, and for the details on how you use each mode today.

Before going further, could you tell us whether you know of any VMware 8 API endpoints that expose this data? We mean ESX datastore latencies, the status of host services (NTP, SSH…), LUN and path status, and host time. The same question applies to a vCenter-wide view of VMware Tools status across all VMs, like the 6/7 tools-vm mode. Finding a reliable source for this data is what has blocked us so far when trying to cover these modes in the VMware 8 connectors release.

We also need to be transparent about one constraint. The VMware 8 connectors rely partly on the vStats REST API. VMware always treated this API as experimental (tech preview), and Broadcom has removed it from vSphere 9 and later. As a result, any new mode built on it would only work with vSphere 8, which is no longer the latest version. Unfortunately this greatly reduces the scope of such a development and weighs on how we can prioritize it.

If you have identified endpoints that are not based on vStats, and that ideally are still available in vSphere 9, please share them. That would change things significantly.

Best regards.