Welcome to check VMware API

Check VMware API is a plugin developed by op5 to primarily be used with op5 Monitor, but can also be used in Naemon or Nagios installations, to monitor VMware ESX and vSphere servers. You can monitor either a single ESX(i)/vSphere server or a VMware VirtualCenter/vCenter Server and individual virtual machines. If you have a VMware cluster you should monitor the data center (VMware VirtualCenter/vCenter Server) and not the individual ESX/vSphere servers.

Supports check status of ESX(i) server, vSphere 5.1 up to vSphere 6.5.

Supported features

The supported feature set will differ a bit between vSphere 5 and vSphere 6; please refer to the tables below for reference:

Checks supported for Hosts

Check	vSphere 5	vSphere 6
CPU	Yes	Yes
IO	Yes	Yes
Memory	Yes	Yes
Network	Yes	Yes
Runtime	Yes	Partially: Overview*, Connection state, Health, Maintenance, Status, Storage Health
Service	Yes	Yes
Uptime	No	Yes
Storage	Yes	No

• Specified in the plugin help text as "^all", meaning that the sub command are omitted

Checks supported for Data centers

Check	vSphere 5	vSphere 6
CPU	Yes	Yes
IO	Yes	Yes
Memory	Yes	Yes
Network	Partially: Overview*, Receive, Send, Usage	Partially: Receive, Send, Usage, Overview*
Runtime	Partially: Overview*, Issues, List, Listcluster, Listhost, Status, Tools	Partially: Overview*, List, Listcluster, Tools
VMFS	Partially: Overview*	Partially: Free space, Used space

• Specified in the plugin help text as "^all", meaning that the sub command are omitted

Prerequisites

'VMware vSphere SDK for Perl', available at https://code.vmware.com/web/sdk/65/vsphere-perl (requires a free account that you sign up for at the same page)

Installation

This is how to install the plugin on CentOS with VMware vSphere SDK for Perl 5.1.

• Download the latest version of the vSphere SDK for Perl package from VMware support page.
• In this example we use VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-5.1.0-780721.x86_64.tar.gz.
• Make sure the following packages are installed.

$ sudo yum install openssl-devel perl-Archive-Zip perl-Class-MethodMaker uuid-perl perl-SOAP-Lite perl-XML-SAX perl-XML-NamespaceSupport perl-XML-LibXML perl-MIME-Lite perl-MIME-Types perl-MailTools perl-TimeDate uuid libuuid perl-Data-Dump perl-UUID cpan libxml2-devel perl-libwww-perl perl-Test-MockObject perl-Test-Simple perl-Monitoring-Plugin perl-Class-Accessor perl-Config-Tiny

• Upload the file "VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK*.tar.gz" to your op5 Monitor server’s /root directory.

$ cd /root/
$ tar xvzf VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-5.1.0-780721.x86_64.tar.gz
$ cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib
$ export ftp_proxy=
$ export http_proxy=
$ ./vmware-install.pl

 "Creating a new vSphere CLI installer database using the tar4 format.

  Installing vSphere CLI 5.1.0 build-780721 for Linux.

   You must read and accept the vSphere CLI End User License Agreement to
   continue.
   Press enter to display it."
   "Do you accept? (yes/no)

• Type “yes” and press "enter".
• In which directory do you want to install the executable files?

[/usr/bin]

• Press Enter

Please wait while copying vSphere CLI files...

The installation of vSphere CLI 5.1.0 build-780721 for Linux completed
successfully. You can decide to remove this software from your system at any
time by invoking the following command:
"/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-vSphere-CLI.pl".

This installer has successfully installed both vSphere CLI and the vSphere SDK
for Perl.  The following Perl modules were found on the system but may be too
old to work with vSphere CLI:
Compress::Zlib 2.037 or newer
Compress::Raw::Zlib 2.037 or newer
version 0.78 or newer
IO::Compress::Base 2.037 or newer
IO::Compress::Zlib::Constants 2.037 or newer
LWP::Protocol::https 5.805 or newer
Enjoy,
--the VMware team
root@op5-system:~/vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib#

• Note that the the issues with old Perl modules DOES NOT need to be resolved. This does not impact the plugins functionality.
• Now, clone or download this repository.
• Within the check_vmware_api repository, type make to run the test suit.
• Copy the check_vmware_api.pl to a suitable location and make sure it is exicutable. Will vary between installations.

$ cp check_vmware_api.pl /opt/plugins/check_vmware_api
$ cd /opt/plugins/
$ chmod 755 check_vmware_api

Usage

Simply run the plugin with:

$ /opt/plugins/check_vmware_api --help

Documentation

• Read the OP5 Monitoring VMware ESX, ESXi, vSphere and vCenter Server (for OP5 Monitor) documentation
• Subscribe to the op5-users mailing list
• Browse the mailing list archives

Get involved - Contribute to the Check VMware API project

It is easy to get involved in the project and to contribute!

• Start using the plugin and if you like what you see, help by spreading the word on blogs and forums.
• If you find a bug you can create a bug report in the issue tracker here on GitHub.

Testing

• Unit tests: This plugin is huge and hard to unit test but if pull requests with unit tests are greatly appreciated.
• Integration tests: This plugin is equipped with an option of generating tests (--generate_test). Simply run the plugin with this flag appended at the end of your command followed by a filename with the following format:

_.dat For example: host_runtime_maintenance_maintwarn.dat So running the plugin from command line with the following will generate the integration test: $ ./check_vmware_api -u -p -H <host_name> -l runtime -s maintenance -o maintwarn --generate_test host_runtime_maintenance_maintwarn.dat You can omit subcommand and/or option from the command and reflect that in the file name. To run all the tests simply run 'make'.

License

See LICENSE.