There are many use cases where VxRAIL manager, VMware vCenter Console, or vSuite will not be enough for your goals in mind. So, for monitoring and management of your VxRAIL cluster, you can utilize the VxRAIL REST API for achieving your end goal in mind.
There are multiple ways to get your hands around the VxRAIL REST API
- VxRAIL REST API Cookbook – PDF Guide
- VxRAIL SwaggerUI
VxRAIL Swagger UI is always (default) runs on the VxRAIL cluster and can be accessed using a browser. Link for accessing the VxRAIL Swagger UI is – https://<VxRAIL_Manager_IP>/rest/vxm/api-doc.html
From the Swagger UI (top right – Select a definition drop-down) you can select the categories of API calls. By default, Swagger UI opens into the Day 1 Bring Up Configuration.
Additionally VxRAIL Swagger UI allows you to play with the APIs on the same page. For this you’ll need to Authorize the page using VxRAIL manager credentials. This is to make sure that user is restricted to the right level of authorization based on their user type.
For executing / trying the APIs on the VxRAIL cluster you can simply choose the definition from the drop-down. In this case I’ve selected Cluster definition.
If you expand the selected API it will show you multiple sections (Cluster Information in this example)
- Parameters – Some APIs needs parameters as input for the successful exectution. If applicable they will be listed here
- Responses – This section shows you the possible response codes for selected API with example output snippet.
When you click on the Try it out button page gets into the run-mode. Once you enter required parameters (not required in this example) you can click on Execute. At this point request will be sent to VxRAIL manage and response (body and headers) will be shown on the same screen.
Way Forward
I hope this gave you the high level overview of VxRAIL APIs and how to access them. Though Swagger has built-in option to try the APIs, but that is the just a API explorer tool. Additionally you can also use the REST clients – like Postman – to interact with the API. Eventually you’ll integrate these APIs with your automation tools – those can be VMware vRA, Ansible, Terraform, or it can be your own developed tool. Technically speaking you can use any tool as far as it has option to interact with REST API.
More on this coming in next blog posts 🙂
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