vSphere

vSphere 7.0 – Infrastructure Profiles Management

Stewart Sheffieldby Stewart Sheffield

Infrastructure Profile Management (IPM) is a new feature in vSphere 7.0 which allows you to maintain a consistent configuration across all your Virtual Centre platforms.

As the below shows you configure the IPM service on a central or management Virtual Centre that is used to capture and create a VC profile. This is then exported in a json foramt that then can be imported into other VC’s.

Machine generated alternative text: vCenter Server profile 1 vc 1 Export json Modify json vCenter Server profile 2 Import Import Import Import Import vc 3 VC 4 vc 5 vc 6


This concept of using profiles is not new to the enterprise VMware admin as the use of Host profiles to ensure the consistent configuration for ESXi servers has been around for a very long time. This new Virtual Centre feature allows you to quickly deploy the same configuration across your environment and also enables the admins to detect any configuration creep as well as having the ability to automate the remediation if and when this takes place.

Once the json file is exported it can be modified manually to allow for other configuration options across the platforms e.g. if you have a different requirement for internal Corp VC’s versus DMZ or tenant VC’s.

An example of some of the configuration settings that are exported when creating a Virtual Centre profile are below

  • Applicance Configuration
  • Backup Scheduler
  • Patching
  • Syslog
  • Send Mail
  • NTP
  • Networking (DNS, Proxy,Firewall)
  • Global Permissions
  • Roles
  • Password Policy
  • Privileges

IPM uses a RESTful API and python 3 to export and import the json configuration file. in vSphere 7.0 there is no UI support so you need to run commands to configure and maintain the feature. to do this we need to have Python 3 installed on a desktop or jumphost and the IPMAutomation.py file downloaded from VMware KB (currently not online will update when it is)

To perform the export and import tasks you need to use the below commands:
Export

IPMAutomation.py --user Username --pwd Password --api export --vcips SourceVirtualCentreIP --profiles Profilename

Validate 

IPMAutomation.py --user Username --pwd Password --api export --vcips DestinationVirtualCentreIP --config_path Path to json file

Import 

IPMAutomation.py --user Username --pwd Password --api import --vcips DestinationVirtualCentreIP --config_path Path to json file