Run CLI Commands on NSX Manager Using REST API

Over the last few years I’ve had a chance to work with NSX-V REST APIs in many different shapes and forms. Directly from vRealize Orchestrator and PowerShell/PowerNSX, indirectly from vRealize Automation or simply by making calls from Postman, which is sometimes required during NSX deployment and upgrades.

To date I haven’t been able to find any gaps in the API and can say only good things about it. It is very well documented. You can find detailed descriptions of all requests in NSX API Guide PDF or interactively browse it in API explorer on https://code.vmware.com.

But at the end of the day, NSX REST API is only a subset of what you can do from CLI and there are situations where it’s not sufficient. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you want to know how much storage is available on NSX Manager appliance log partition. There’s a REST API call, which will give you a response similar to this:

GET https://nsxm/api/1.0/appliance-management/system/storageinfo

<storageInfo>
  <totalStorage>86G</totalStorage>
  <usedStorage>22G</usedStorage>
  <freeStorage>64G</freeStorage>
  <usedPercentage>25</usedPercentage>
</storageInfo>

As you can see, it answers the question of how much total space is available on the appliance, but doesn’t provide a full per partition breakdown available from the CLI via “show filesystem”:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       5.6G  1.2G  4.1G  23% /
tmpfs           7.9G  232K  7.9G   1% /run
devtmpfs        7.9G     0  7.9G   0% /dev
/dev/sda6        44G   19G   24G  44% /common
/dev/loop0       16G   45M   15G   1% /common/vdisk_mnt

So what are the options here? What is not widely known is that you can use NSX central command-line interface to remotely invoke appliance CLI commands using REST API.

Invoking CLI Commands

NSX REST API has a handy POST call https://nsxm/api/1.0/nsx/cli?action=execute. All you need to provide in addition to Authorization credentials using “Basic Auth” option is the following body in XML format:

<nsxcli>
  <command>show filesystem</command>
</nsxcli>

In response you will get a body in “text/plain” format, which is the only drawback of this method. You will need to parse the response in your scripting language of choice. In PowerShell, if you made the original call using Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet and saved it into the $response variable, it can look something like this:

$responseRows = $response.Content -split "`n"
foreach($row in $responseRows) {
  if($row -Like "*/dev/sda6*") {
    $pctUsed = $row.Split(" ",[StringSplitOptions]"RemoveEmptyEntries")[4]
    $pctUsedValue = $pctUsed.Substring(0, $pctUsed.Length-1)
    Write-Host "Space utilization on the log partition is $pctUsed."
    break
  }
}

Conclusion

For most use cases NSX REST API provides all the necessary information about NSX component configuration in structured JSON or XML format. This method is more of an exception rather than a rule, but it’s a nice tool to have in your tool belt, when you run out of options.

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General view of IBM DB2 architecture

No one would argue that DB2 is one of the leading (R)DBMS products in the market. As any other powerful software product it has complex architecture. Here I’d like to introduce some basic terminology of it in series of posts because sometimes this terminology can become somewhat vague.

Lets kick off by explaining some general view of DB2. Each IBM DB2 installation has following basic levels of architecture:

• Instance can be understood as a completely independent environment with it’s own security configuration, resource allocation and contains databases and partitions isolated from all other instances. Each instance has its own system processes which manage data. Instance may contain several databases.
• Database is a most familiar term. It’s a logical unit which holds your data. It has complicated structure which we will explain later on. Database can reside in one or more partitions.
• Partitions (or nodes) is a way of creating DB2 database cluster for the sake of higher performance. You can split your database onto several servers where each of them will have their own chunk of data. Since more servers means more CPU cores, memory and disk I/O it’s a natural way of scaling DB2. Particular storage resource is called Container.
• Database is then mapped onto several Tablespaces. Tablespace allows you to manage how database tables are held on your storage resources. For example you can hold your data in files as well as on raw hard drives (which is faster). In addition it’s possible to put frequently used data on SAS hard drives and rarely used on SATA by means of creating two different tablespaces. On top of that you can set up a different page size for each of your tablespaces.

Here is the basic idea of what DB2 represents from the view of systems administrator. To better understand a folding of different levels please refer to this well-known among dbtwoers picture: link.