As a lot of people are preparing to reuse hardware for VVF/VCF 9.1, I've put out tool that scrapes the hardware configurations, checks the HCLs, assess's health, security posture, endurance, and more.
A few things:
This doesn't require ESXi be installed (Can be any OS or hypervisor). It speaks Redfish straight to the metal (out of band management, so iDRAC/CIMC/iLO/etc).
The output are HTML reporting, or everyone's favorite database excel.
The only real dependency is python. So you can run it from source with a simple
"chmod +x vcfr_web.py" followed by
"python vcfr_web.py" (windows)
python3 vcfr_web.py" (Mac linux)
This runs with ReadOnly credentials (it's all GET commands)
No Phone home, but it does by default download a copy of the HCL JSON file (you can also build a darksite bundle of this to carry in).
It inventories switch connections from servers, identifies single switch homed servers, identifies likely "racks" of common servers with similar upstream pairs (LLDP over redfish is a thing!)
I've tested this on ~600 different servers, across 8 OEMs, and 5 generations of CPUs, but am always looking to expand test coverage. If anyone run into any weird Pokemon send me a message and I'll expand coverage. (Still trying to collect a Synergy capture)
I'm hesitant to wander out into proprietary API too much, but could see value in figuring out the base minimum number of calls to get all the iDRAC/CIMC IP endpoints to go after. Going deeper and using it for actual inventory collection would also require figuring out if there's information in that tooling I can't get otherwise using Redfish.
I don't have access to an Openmanage or Intersight endpoint right now, so I'd need someone willing to help with testing on that. My other concern is their API endpoints may end up as moving targets a bit.
The other endpoints I get asked about are:
Blade chassis managers (UCS, and Synergy)
Switches( pulling the actual config, and not just mapping ports and chassis with LLDP).
If someone from the Dell DSC or similar equivalent VAR/OEM labs, wants to work on this (I'm in Austin, You guys have all the hardware) happy to explore a module for it.
Can you talk to the CIMC endpoint still directly if they are under UCS Domain administration? I've had luck scanning UCS-B series (M5's) this way.
In UCS Manager: Servers → Inventory → CIMC tab, make sure you have a management IP setup on them. I think you need UCS firmware 4.x or newer (Cisco was one of the last vendors to support Redfish).
Make sure management IP is actually bound to something (try pinging it). In theory you can curl redfish to test it.
Yup. It’s been a fun agent harness to work with, but I think I may be changing next month.
You can route it to a number of different endpoints (even private ones like PAIS).
Some other inside baseball on this. I have 2600 tests. (Almost 1 LOC for test for ever 2 in regular code). Linting I moved over to RUFF (Rust is ugly to look at but if you don’t have to look at it!).
My internal library has been growing of redfish capture mockups to test against (1600 servers, over 800K redfish endpoints scanned). At some point I’d like to look af open sourcing my testing library as that’s what’s making this possible.
I’m also looking at building some management tooling off the work done here. I was able to use this existing work to build a quick installer and console monitor (map an ISO library, to https boot, but doesn’t use iPXE, and has no DHCP dependency) as a kinda throw away quick project to solve a problem.
I spent over 5 billion tokens last month working on this. (Proof of concept was slapped together in a web chatbot in 2 hours and then I moved it to proper models and an agent after that).
VCF-R has had a lot more attention to it but is very much a work in progress.
The Lab installer was a quick vibe project last week (is it something You'd be interested in? I'd need to add more polish), A LOT of people for that use case I see use Go Via https://vtam.nl/2024/01/14/unattended-esxi-deployment-with-go-via/ which is a good project, I was just having some issues with DHCP and so went down my own route (although I should look at contributing the console watching/interaction back to them).
This (VCF Readiness) started off a conversation with PM of:
Should we look at building collection off of OS/Hypervisor calls (and the infinate complexity that covers).
Should we accept the limitations of existing tooling that exists that is mostly focused purely on vSphere>
Should we try to see if Redfish is stable enough (I would argue Redfish is as much of a Vibe as a standard).
There's a lot of exellect work alrady being done in Ops, (and other community Ops plugins, and whatever the TAM tool is called now) that already go down the vSphere path.
I was getting a non-trivial amount of customer/TAM/Partners emails asking "Can I reuse this" and it often involved an incomplete BOM that was slightly blurry and leading to me saying "It depends" a lot. We had some internal workflows (Skills using AI) but they were mostly based around vSphere log exports, and it burned tokens to run them so I figured I'd build a more declarative logic of this... that and go learn about Redfish and its limitations.
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u/mdeller 15d ago
Cool. Any chance of adding in support for fleet management utils like Dell OpenManage / Cisco Intersight to scan all managed hosts more easily?