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.

Hello ​@ltirand 

Thanks for looking into this. I’ll see if I can get info about those endpoints.

About the experimental nature of the API and its removal in vSphere 9, I’m a bit confused. I read here that the “REST API connectors have not been deprecated in version 9.1 and that they will remain valid at least until version 10”. This means that for version 9 you’ll need to release a new connector?

Regards

Hello ​@emeck 

You’re right to point this out, and I owe you a correction. In that earlier thread I passed on what a Broadcom contact had told us: that the endpoints used by our REST API connectors would remain valid until at least version 10. That information turned out to be wrong. As Raphaël explained in the same thread, VMware has decommissioned the vStats API in vSphere 9.1, and that is the API the VMware 8 VM and ESX REST connectors rely on. Another user in that thread reported the same thing: on 9.1, the /stats/acq-specs endpoint returns an OPERATION_NOT_FOUND error, both from our connector and from the vCenter API explorer.

To answer your question: yes, supporting vSphere 9.1 and later will require new connectors. VMware now recommends using the RealMetrics API instead of vStats, and that idea has been refocused on building connectors on top of it.

This is why we are cautious about adding new modes to the vStats-based VMware 8 connectors, since they would not carry over to 9.1. It is also worth knowing that the SDK-based connectors (the 6/7 ones, which run through the Centreon VMware daemon) are still compatible with 9.1. So you can keep using them for these checks for now.

Any endpoint information you can find for the data you listed is still very welcome. Ideally it would come from APIs that are still available in 9.1 (RealMetrics or others), so we can take it into account in the new connectors.

Best Regards.

​@ltirand 

Thanks for the clarification.

Regards.