How to get information from a running virtual machine

Introduction
Scenario requirements
How to collect information
- Filesystem
- Guest identity
- Network
- Network interfaces
- Network routes

Introduction

This section shows you how to collection information from a running virtual machine.

Scenario requirements

You”ve already followed vmware_rest_run_a_vm and your virtual machine runs VMware Tools.

How to collect information

In this example, we use the vcenter_vm_guest_* module to collect information about the associated resources.

Filesystem

Here we use vcenter_vm_guest_localfilesystem_info to retrieve the details about the filesystem of the guest. In this example we also use a retries loop. The VMware Tools may take a bit of time to start and by doing so, we give the VM a bit more time.

- name: Get guest filesystem information
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm_guest_localfilesystem_info:
    vm: '{{ test_vm1_info.id }}'
  register: _result
  until:
  - _result is not failed
  retries: 60
  delay: 5

response

{
    "attempts": 6,
    "changed": false,
    "value": {
        "/": {
            "capacity": 2515173376,
            "free_space": 774774784,
            "mappings": []
        }
    }
}

Guest identity

You can use vcenter_vm_guest_identity_info to get details like the OS family or the hostname of the running VM.

- name: Get guest identity information
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm_guest_identity_info:
    vm: '{{ test_vm1_info.id }}'
  register: _result

response

{
    "changed": false,
    "value": {
        "family": "LINUX",
        "full_name": {
            "args": [],
            "default_message": "Red Hat Fedora (64-bit)",
            "id": "vmsg.guestos.fedora64Guest.label"
        },
        "host_name": "localhost.localdomain",
        "ip_address": "fe80::e5f5:b5f1:dd56:798",
        "name": "FEDORA_64"
    }
}

Network

vcenter_vm_guest_networking_info will return the OS network configuration.

- name: Get guest networking information
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm_guest_networking_info:
    vm: '{{ test_vm1_info.id }}'
  register: _result

response

{
    "changed": false,
    "value": {
        "dns": {
            "ip_addresses": [
                "10.0.2.3"
            ],
            "search_domains": [
                "localdomain"
            ]
        },
        "dns_values": {
            "domain_name": "localdomain",
            "host_name": "localhost.localdomain"
        }
    }
}

Network interfaces

vcenter_vm_guest_networking_interfaces_info will return a list of NIC configurations.

Network routes

Use vcenter_vm_guest_networking_routes_info to explore the route table of your vitual machine.

- name: Get guest network routes information
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm_guest_networking_routes_info:
    vm: '{{ test_vm1_info.id }}'
  register: _result

response

{
    "changed": false,
    "value": [
        {
            "interface_index": 0,
            "network": "fe80::",
            "prefix_length": 64
        },
        {
            "interface_index": 0,
            "network": "fe80::e5f5:b5f1:dd56:798",
            "prefix_length": 128
        },
        {
            "interface_index": 0,
            "network": "ff00::",
            "prefix_length": 8
        }
    ]
}