Just a few years ago coming across an infrastructure product (software or hardware) that supports REST APIs was a rare thing. Today it’s the opposite. Buying, say, a storage array from a major vendor, that doesn’t support some sort of an API can be seen as a potential drawback. It’s now gotten to a point where certain operations can only be done via API and are not available in the GUI. So basic programming skills become more and more important.
I have come across such situation with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM or just LCM) product from VMware. If you have a request that got stuck, the only way to cancel it (at least at the time of writing) is to use LCM’s REST APIs. It can’t be done from the GUI.
While I was tackling this issue, I noticed that there aren’t many articles on how to make REST calls to LCM on the Internet, so I though I’d use this opportunity to show how to do it.
Authentication
First challenge you have to deal with is authentication. LCM doesn’t support basic authentication, like other products, for instance NSX. You need a token.
This is how you can get a token in Postman:
- Submit a POST call
- Use the following URL – https://lcm-hostname/lcm/api/v1/login
- Enter the following body:
{
"username":"admin@localhost",
"password":"vmware"
}
This is what it will look like in Postman:
When you click send you should get a token in response:
Making REST Calls
Now you need to specify the token as one of the headers, with “x-xenon-auth-token” as key and the token itself as value:
From here, you are ready to make actual REST API calls. Coming back to our example, we can go to LCM GUI and copy the ID of the stuck request from the browser window:
And then make a DELETE call with empty body to cancel the request:
As a result, traces of the request will be completely deleted from LCM.
Note: The only catch here, that you have to remove “v1” version of the API from the URL. Or it will not work.
Swagger UI
LCM supports Swagger, which lets you run REST API calls straight from the browser. So if you want to feel yourself a hacker, open the https://lcm-hostname/api URL and you can get the token and make requests by simply using the “Try It Out” button, specifying required parameters and hitting “Execute”.
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