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IBM Systems Director VMControl resource lifecycle management: part 2

Remote virtual appliance lifecycle management using the VMControl REST APIs

Piyush Jain (piyushjain@in.ibm.com), Staff Software Engineer, IBM　　

Piyush Jain is a Staff Software Engineer at IBM currently working on VMControl under IBM Systems Director, a critical product in IBM's product portfolio. He has an overall experience of around 6 years and holds a bachelor's degree in Information Technology Engineering from IET Alwar, Rajasthan India. You can contact him at piyushjain@in.ibm.com
(An IBM developerWorks Contributing Author)

Nicholas Schambureck (nschambu@us.ibm.com), Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Nick Schambureck is an Advisory Software Engineer and Team Leader for the IBM Systems Director VMControl command-line interface and REST API team. He has been working with the project since its inception.

Poornima Soundararajan (poornima.s@in.ibm.com), Staff Software Engineer, IBM

Poornima Soundararajan is working as a Staff Software Engineer for the IBM Systems Director VMControl advanced manager. Poornima has more than 7 years of experience in Java/J2EE technologies.

Aparna Khare (apakhare@in.ibm.com), System Software Engineer, IBM

Aparna Khare is working as a System Software Engineer for the IBM Systems Director VMControl advanced manager. Aparna has 4 years of experience in Java/J2EE technologies.

Summary: IBM® Systems Director is a platform management solution that is used to manage physical and virtual systems in a multisystem environment. It supports various virtualization technologies and multiple operating systems across IBM and non-IBM platforms. IBM Systems Director VMControl™ is an advanced manager of IBM Systems Director, a free-to-own set of platform management tools. This tutorial is part of a series on VMControl resource lifecycle management. This tutorial explains the virtual appliance lifecycle using the VMControl Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs).

View more content in this series

Date: 25 Jan 2013
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (491 KB | 29 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 12183 views
Comments:

Modify a virtual appliance

List the virtual appliances available to modify

The first step in modifying a virtual appliance is to retrieve a list of available virtual appliances. This can be done by either retrieving all known virtual appliances or by retrieving a list of virtual appliances that exists on an image repository. This example retrieves all virtual appliances. Select the appropriate virtual appliances from the list and save the value of its OID property. This value can be used in the subsequent requests.

URL
- https://myserver:port/{webContext}/VMControl/virtualAppliances
HTTP method
- GET

Sample request

Get the list of all virtual appliances:

GET https://myserver:port/{webContext}/VMControl/virtualAppliances

Listing 14. Sample response representation

        
{
    "candidates": {
        "uri": "/ibm/director/rest/VMControl/virtualAppliances/candidates"
    },
    "virtualAppliances": [
        {
            "properties": {},
            "oid": 28912,
            "name": "Virtual Appliance 1",
            "uri": "/ibm/director/rest/VMControl/virtualAppliances/28912"
        },
        {
            "properties": {},
            "oid": 29731,
            "name": "cap_nim",
            "uri": "/ibm/director/rest/VMControl/virtualAppliances/29731"
        },
        {
            "properties": {},
            "oid": 20495,
            "name": "cap_nim_aixmobb",
            "uri": "/ibm/director/rest/VMControl/virtualAppliances/20495"
        }
    ],
    "uri": "/ibm/director/rest/VMControl/virtualAppliances"
}

Retrieve the OVF descriptor file for the virtual appliance

You can choose your virtual appliance and fetch the OVF descriptor file currently defined for the virtual appliance that needs to be updated. Using the virtual appliance OID from the previous step, create a GET request to the URL specified below.

It is recommended that you specify the Accept-Charset HTTP header to retrieve the OVF file in the format in which it was imported. If Accept-Charset is not specified, VMControl attempts to retrieve it in the UTF-8 format.

URL
- https://myserver:port/{webContext}/VMControl/virtualAppliances/{virtualApplianceOID}.ovf
HTTP method
- GET
Sample request
Get the OVF descriptor file of virtual appliance 28912:

GET https://myserver:port/{webContext}/VMControl/virtualAppliances/28912.ovf
- Sample response representation
  The actual OVF file.

Modify a virtual appliance

Finally, it is time to create the modify virtual appliance request. Modify the OVF descriptor file that was retrieved from the previous step to add or remove information. Pass it in as the request body of your PUT request, specifying application/ovf+xml for your Content-Type HTTP header.

Note: VMControl will only validate whether the OVF file is syntactically correct. It is the responsibility of the developer to ensure that the OVF file will allow for the image to be deployed successfully.

The response contains the status of the modify virtual appliance request, including error messages.

URL
- https://myserver:port/{webContext}/VMControl/virtualAppliances/{virtualApplianceOID}
HTTP method
- PUT

Sample request

Modify the virtual appliance with a unique ID of 28912:

PUT https://myserver:port/{webContext}/VMControl/virtualAppliances/28912

Sample request representation
The updated OVF XML and the Content-Type should be application/ovf+xml

Listing 15. Sample response

        
Status Code: 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: no-store
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 966
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 12:24:21 GMT
Server: Noelios-Restlet-Engine/1.1.4

{
    "MessageID": "DNZEMW440E",
    "MessageText": "DNZEMW440E Update OVF request for virtual appliance: 
						\"28912\" succeeded."
}