vCO - VcOptionValue which value type?

Got some tricky task this week: Change the advanced parameter "NFS.MaxVolumes" of a ESX host to 256. First thought was: my post for VcOptionValue on the virtual machine. So I searched for the scripting class and wrote some like this:



var configMgr = myHost.configManager;

for(i in configMgr.advancedOption.queryOptions("NFS.MaxVolumes")){
            System.debug(configMgr.advancedOption.queryOptions("NFS.MaxVolumes")[0].key);
}

var oValues = new Array();
oValues[0] = new VcOptionValue() ;
oValues[0].key = "NFS.MaxVolumes";
oValues[0].value = 256;


try {
            configMgr.advancedOption.updateOptions(oValues);
}catch (e){

           System.log("Could not setAdvanced Settings. Error: " + e);
}



which should be run. But after firing this in vCO there comes an error message like: "wrong parameter" and "internal error". I looked into the vCO logs, the vSphere client and the vpxd.log but all messages didn´t show the exact problem.

After some investigation i found out that the type definition of the value is necessary! So there are some like int, float or long. In my case "long" was the answer. So the code has to look like this:




var configMgr = myHost.configManager;

for(i in configMgr.advancedOption.queryOptions("NFS.MaxVolumes")){
            System.debug(configMgr.advancedOption.queryOptions("NFS.MaxVolumes")[0].key);
}

var oValues = new Array();
oValues[0] = new VcOptionValue() ;
oValues[0].key = "NFS.MaxVolumes";
oValues[0].value_LongValue = 256;


try {
            configMgr.advancedOption.updateOptions(oValues);
}catch (e){

           System.log("Could not setAdvanced Settings. Error: " + e);
}

So, after the next test everything was fine :)

vCO - how to determine free dvSwitch ports

Last week one of my customers ask for a method to report the free ports of all dvSwitch port-groups. First step I try was to look in the API explorer for a "freePorts" parameter, but there wasn´t one. So I developed a litte workflow including some loops (Thanks to Christophe for the bookmarked vCOteam article: Creating workflow loops).

The loops are necessary because of the unknown count of port-groups on the dvSwitch. So the whole workflow looks like this:

The IN parameters are: DVports(String or number) and DVswitch (VC:DistributedVirtualSwitch). The DVports define the minimum available ports for the port groups and the DVswitch is the Switch to test on.

The first element "getAllPortGroups" gets all port-groups and test if it is a uplink port-group which I don´t want to test. The result is an array filled with all port-groups.

var DVSgroups = new Array();
for(i in DVS.portgroup){
if(DVS.portgroup[i].config.name.match("Uplink")){
System.log("Port-group is uplink port-group.");
}
else{
DVSgroups.push(DVS.portgroup[i]);
}
}


The next element "LoopSetup" sets the number of port-groups for the looping (DVSnb = DVSgroups.length;) and the following decision tests if the DVSnb is greater than 0 which allows you to iterate over every port-group. If the decision is true the counter will be lowered in the next step (counter = counter-1;) and the actual port-group is set in the next task (DVportGroup = DVSgroups[DVSnb];).

Now we have one port-group to test on (screenshot, cause the code raises an error in blogspot):

As you can see I decided to count the connectees (VM Nics) of the port-groups to ensure that double used ports are counted.

I hope this helps you to find some free ports :)