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Preliminary Connnectivity Check

Before installing the VI Perl Toolkit, you should confirm the connection from your intended development workstation to the target server system: If issues arise after you install the VI Perl Toolkit, you’ll have one less factor to troubleshoot.

The quickest way to check connectivity is to launch a browser (on the host system you intend to use for VI Perl Toolkit scripting) and navigate to the Managed Object Browser (MOB), the web-based server application hosted on all ESX Server and VirtualCenter Server systems. The MOB lets you explore the objects on the system and obtain information about available properties and methods—it’s a great tool for learning about the VI API and object model in the context of “live” virtual machines running on host systems. Unless the ESX Server or VirtualCenter Management Server web server has been configured to support HTTP (rather than HTTPS), you’ll need a user name and password to log into the MOB (step 3, below).

To access the MOB on any ESX Server or VirtualCenter Management Server system:

  1. Launch a browser.
  2. Enter the fully-qualified domain name (or the IP address) for the ESX Server host or VirtualCenter Management Server:

    https://<hostname.yourcompany.com>/mob

    You’ll be notified that the “VMware VI SDK Browser requires a username and password,” with a prompt requring a user name and password.

  3. Enter the user account and password for the server system—typically, root/password for the ESX Server system, and Administrator/password for VirtualCenter Management Server system. Or, obtain the user account and password information from your VMware system administrator.

    After entering user account and password, you will see some preliminary warning messages regarding the authority of the SSL certificate, such as “Website Certified by an Unknown Authority” (assuming that the default server certificate provided by VMware has not been replaced. Also, note that the specific message text varies by web browser.) You can safely disregard such warnings and continue to logon to the MOB—assuming that VMware is the certificate authority.

Note:   If the ESX Server or VirtualCenter Management Server system has been configured to support regular HTTP (non-SSL) connections, you won’t be prompted for user name and password, nor will you see any SSL-certificate-related warnings.

When you’ve successfully connected to the MOB, the browser displays the managed object reference for the service (ManagedObjectReference:ServiceInstance), available properties (with values) and methods, as shown in this example:

Connect to a VirtualCenter Server MOB to obtain information about the MORef (ManagedObjectReference) for the ServiceInstance—Click to enlarge this image

Assuming that you can connect to the MOB from your host system, you can now install the VI Perl Toolkit and successfully run Utility Applications or scripts using this same server name, user account, and password.

Copyright © 2007 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

VI Perl Toolkit 1.0 | Released 30-Aug-2007 | Last updated 28-August-2007 7:00 pm