[VCL-499] support for controlling VMware vCenter infrastructure through the vSphere SDK

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.3
• Component/s: vcld (backend)

Environment

VMware vCenter infrastructure

• Assignee: Aaron Coburn
• Reporter: Aaron Coburn
• Created: 16/Aug/11 16:14
• Updated: 11/May/12 17:27
• Resolved: 11/May/12 17:27

Description

The VCL's vSphere SDK module supports direct communication with ESX hosts, but not with the vCenter. This is relevant for VMware clusters with distributed resource scheduling enabled.

I have written a module as a subclass of the vSphere_SDK package, which I have called vCenter.pm. This works with version 2.2.1. We use this in the VCL implementation at Amherst College. The vCenter module makes two primary changes in how the vSphere_SDK package works. First, it reimplements any call to VIExt::get_host_view(), which does not work in the context of a vCenter. And secondly, moving and copying a virtual disk by means of the VirtualDiskManager does not work with a vCenter connection, so these functions had to be manually implemented using a FileManager object.

In addition to the vCenter package, there is a VMware::Cluster module that redefines the value of $VCL::Module::Provisioning::VMware::VMware::VSPHERE_SDK_PACKAGE. This is a subclass of the VMware package and is the package referenced in the VCL's "module" table.

For our implementation, I also added a 'datacenter' value to vcld.conf which provides the name of the datacenter.

The corresponding changes in utils.pm are here:

223d222
< $DATACENTER
264d262
< our ($DATACENTER) = 0;
434,437d431
< #Datacenter name
< if ($l =~ /datacenter=([-a-zA-Z0-9]+)/)

{ < $DATACENTER = $1; < }

(It would be more elegant to add a field to the database for this, as it corresponds to the entry in vmprofile, but this was simpler to implement)

The VMware::Cluster and VMware::vCenter modules are attached to this issue as files.