Getting metadata from within VMWare Guest OS

Question

Is there a way to get metadata (i.e. VM Name, Annotations, etc.) from within the Guest OS? I'm using a Ubuntu JeOS template and want to run a script on startup which configures new VMs according to the metadata. This is on VMWare ESX.

Answer 1

You can set a VM's guestinfo property from the outside (e.g. with govc) and query it from the inside (requiring open-vm-tools):

Outside:

govc vm.change -e 'guestinfo.foo=bar' <yourVM>

Inside:

vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.foo"

Source: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/01/how-to-extract-host-information-from.html, RedHat's OpenShift on vSphere Installation Guide

Answer 2

I imagine you could use the vSphere SDK for Perl inside your VM to query those items:

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/viperltoolkit/

You could ask here:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/vsphere_sdk_perl

Answer 3

You can obtain some information (most importan, the VM UUID) by running dmidecode from inside the Guest OS. For example:

[root@localhost ~]# dmidecode
...
Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 27 bytes
System Information
        Manufacturer: VMware, Inc.
        Product Name: VMware Virtual Platform
        Version: None
        Serial Number: VMware-42 [REDACTED]
        UUID: [REDACTED]
        Wake-up Type: Power Switch
        SKU Number: Not Specified
        Family: Not Specified

Answer 4

You can install ansible & pyvmomi & then use module vsphere_guest or community.vmware.vmware_guest ( preferred )

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/vmware/vmware_guest_module.html

or

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/vmware/vmware_vm_info_module.html

---
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  connection: local
  vars_files:
    - /etc/ansible/playbooks/vars/vmware_vars_dc1.yml
tasks:
    - name: Gather VM info 
      community.vmware.vmware_vm_info:
        hostname: "{{ vcenter_server }}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_user }}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_pass }}"
        validate_certs: no
        vm_type: all
      register: vm_info
    - debug:
        msg: 'VM {{ vm_info }}'

Answer 5

Adding to Fuero's answer, I've used ansible and rc.local previously to configure VMs via guestfacts

ansible vm config

      guestinfo.hostname: "{{ inventory_hostname.split('.')[0] }}"
      guestinfo.fqdn: "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
      guestinfo.domain: "{{ domain }}"
      guestinfo.ip4: "{{ vm_ip4 }}"
      guestinfo.ip6: "{{ vm_ip6 | default(omit) }}"

rc.local

# Set host IP Address
nmcli con mod ens192 ipv4.method manual ipv4.addr "$(vmtoolsd --cmd 'info-get guestinfo.ip4')/24" ipv4.gateway "$(vmtoolsd --cmd 'info-get guestinfo.ip4' | sed 's/\.[0-9]*$/.1/')" ipv4.dns "$(vmtoolsd --cmd 'info-get guestinfo.ip4' | sed 's/\.[0-9]*$/.53/')" ipv4.dns-search $(vmtoolsd --cmd 'info-get guestinfo.domain')
Set Hostname
nmcli general hostname $(vmtoolsd --cmd 'info-get guestinfo.fqdn')

Answer 6

Nowadays instead of vSphere SDK for Perl there is PowerCLI, based on MS's Powershell. You can get any kind of information and change settings regarding VMs, hosts, clusters, and eveything else VMware related.

PowerCLI's VM cmdlets

Answer 7

I'm not aware of any published APIs that allow you to do this with ESX but I am also aware that VMWare have private APIs - fingers crossed they open them up soon.