The v0.2.0 release of vPoller comes with a lot of new features, bug fixes and lots of new methods for discovery and collecting of vSphere Object properties!

Below you will a summary of the changes in vPoller version 0.2.0 along with a detailed changelog.

For more information about vPoller please refer to this article, which explains the design and goals of vPoller.

You can also find the vPoller project repository at Github.

What’s New in vPoller

Below you can find the summary of new features, improvements and highlights in vPoller version 0.2.0:

• Integration with pyVmomi API bindings
• Implemented efficient way for retrieving object properties using vSphere Views
• Improved performance during discovery and polling (thanks to pyVmomi!)
• Lots of new discovery and polling methods for various vSphere Managed Objects
• vSphere Agent configuration is now managed by an SQLite backend
• … and other small fixes and improvements

Please read further for more details on what’s new in vPoller version 0.2.0

Integration with pyVmomi API bindings

Before release v0.2.0, vPoller was using pysphere for managing connections to the vSphere host and retrieving of properties.

pysphere is good enough for most of the things we do, but unfortunately it can be quite slow when we need to deal with lots of properties and objects, so we had to look for a way to improve this.

Somewhere last year (near Christmas, 2013) VMware has officially released the VMware’s vSphere API Python bindings. Compared to pysphere, the pyVmomi bindings seems to be much better.

A few (but very important!) advantages of pyVmomi worth mentioning here:

• Official API bindings released by VMware
• Function and object names map directly to what is documented in the vSphere Web Services SDK
• Feature-full API bindings
• Much better performance
• … and more …

The only disadvantage of pyVmomi I can find so far is the lack of documentation, so it takes some time getting used to it. Though, once you wrap your head around you start to really appreciate how good pyVmomi is.

So, in summary having pyVmomi integration in vPoller is a great improvement by itself!

Better way to retrieve object properties

Starting with vPoller version 0.2.0 we are now collecting vSphere object properties using vSphere Views.

By using pyVmomi with vSphere Views we are able to efficiently select a subset of the objects in inventory and collect their properties. And this gives us a better performance!

Unified configuration of vPoller

From v0.2.0 of vPoller the configuration of all components now resides in a single file, which makes it easier to maintain and configure.

In previous versions of vPoller we were using separate config file for each component - Proxy, Worker and Client, but now all that resides in a single file.

Example configuration file for vPoller version 0.2.0:

[proxy]
frontend = tcp://*:10123
backend  = tcp://*:10124
mgmt     = tcp://*:9999

[worker]
db       = /var/lib/vconnector/vconnector.db
proxy    = tcp://localhost:10124
mgmt     = tcp://*:10000

The table below provides information about the config entries used along with a description for each of them.

More vPoller methods supported

The list of supported vPoller methods is growing. The table below summarizes the supported vPoller methods as of version 0.2.0:

vSphere Agents configuration is handled by an SQLite backend

The vSphere Agents are responsible for managing connections and retrieve properties from a vSphere host. Their configuration such as username, password, hostname, etc. used to be stored in plain text files in previous versions.

With vPoller version 0.2.0 all that has been moved to an SQLite database and the whole configuration can now be done from the command-line using the vconnector-cli tool.

Here is how to add a new vSphere Agent in version 0.2.0 of vPoller.

$ sudo vconnector-cli -H vc01.example.org -U root -P p4ssw0rd add

Make sure you enable the vSphere Agent, otherwise it will not be used by the vPoller Worker:

$ sudo vconnector-cli -H vc01.example.org enable

At any time you can view the currently registered vSphere Agents by running the vconnector-cli get command, e.g.:

$ sudo vconnector-cli get
+--------------+---------------------+-------------+-----------+
| Hostname     | Username            | Password    |   Enabled |
+==============+=====================+=============+===========+
| vc01         | root                | p4ssw0rd    |         1 |
+--------------+---------------------+-------------+-----------+