armchair dot tech
Tags: api, python, programming, vmware, pysphere
I do a good bit of work with VMWare vSphere and I’ve been wanting to work more with their API. Everything (except console) that you can do in the vSphere client, you should be able to do through a web-based API. Unfortunately, it seems that VMWare does not provide an SDK for Python, my current language of choice. I could work in Perl or Java, but I want to develop a web application, which I don’t want to do in Perl. Fortunately, I found pysphere, which is a fairly active project of implementing the VI API in python. It might not fully implement the API, but it looks relatively stable and easy to implement. Plus, if I find any functionality missing, I can extend the class directly. I followed their Getting Started page to get it installed and get connected, but I didn’t like having my password right there in my working code. This was easily resolved by installing PyYaml and creating a config.yaml file. Then, it was just a matter of following along with the examples to make a good test script. My config.yaml:
My test.py:
And does it work?
I was even able to go so far as cloning a vm (vm2 = vm1.clone(‘new vm’)) and can already see massive possibilities with this library in its current state. The API can be queried much like a simple database, and objects acted upon with simple statements. Operations like my vm clone can be setup as a task and run asynchrously. I could easily see integrating this with something like tornado, twisted, or even cyclone to make a non-blocking web framework.