Aria Operations for Logs, found a bug in Access Control

It looks like VMware Aria Operations for Logs (previously Log Insight) contains a bug in the Access Control part. I will explain; Access is granted by assigning a role to users or groups. A role is a group of permissions that ultimately determines what a user is allowed to do.
For more information about the Roles and permissions in Aria Operations for logs, read my post.Fig. 1 – Four predefined Roles

Aria Operations for Logs API and Workspace ONE issue

A brief description, recently I ran into a issue when working with an Aria Operations for Logs cluster configured to use Workspace One Access enabled for Active Directory support as an authentication source. Logging in via the GUI was not the problem, I was updating scripts as described in this post to work with Workspace One Access.

While working with the Aria Operations for Logs API, the first step is to authenticate. Authentication requires 3 parameters: username, password and provider.

The username and password do not require further explanation, although, one should also pay attention to the username in some cases.
The provider refers to the three supported authentication sources: Local (in case the local admin account is used), Active Directory (in case Active Directory support has been configured) and finally Workspace One Access.

The first part of the solution; the name of the provider should be written with the capital letters in the right places, like “Local”, “ActiveDirectory” and finally “vIDM” for Workspace One Access.

The second part, note the username. As an example when Workspace One Access has been enabled for an Active Directory named “acme.com”, the username should be something like “user@acme.com”. This notation will not work: “acme\user”.

I hope you can benefit from this, thank you for reading.

Aria Operations for Logs 8.12

Recently VMware released vRealize Log Insight, correction “VMware Aria Operations for Logs” version  8.12. The new name for this product had been going around for some time, but this is the first version to be released as “VMware Aria Operations for Logs” as you can see after booting the product.Fig. 1

Although things are still not always going well with the new naming as you can see below.Fig. 2

Apart from the branding, what else comes with the 8.12 version? The full overview can be found in the release-notes can be found here.

Terraform and vSphere – Part 4: More Compute Cluster Resources

Introduction

In my previous posts we talked about Terraform, Desired State (and used a Compute Resource as an example) and Importing resources in a follow-up post. However VM/Host Groups, VM/Host Rules and VM Overrides are also part of the Cluster configuration.

Unlike the resource vsphere_compute_cluster where the state of a large number of options is automatically monitored by Terraform, this is not the case for the options discussed in this post.
Here it’s what you see is what you get. If you use Terraform, then it is more than a good practice to let Terraform take care of everything.
By this I mean the following; if you have created an affinity rule with Terraform for 2 VMs called VM1 and VM2, then the state of this affinity rule is monitored by Terraform. But if you manually create a second affinity rule for 2 VMs called VM3 and VM4, then this second affinity rule is unknown to Terraform and its state is not monitored. Should this occur, it can of course be solved by importing the second rule into the Terraform configuration afterwards.

Having said this, time for an overview of these cluster resources.
In vSphere Compute Clusters, 4 types of VM/Host rules can be created:

Keep virtual Machines together: Terraform resource:
vsphere_compute_cluster_vm_affinity_rule

Separate Virtual machines: Terraform resource:
vsphere_compute_cluster_vm_anti_affinity_rule

Virtual Machines to Hosts: Terraform resources:
vsphere_compute_cluster_host_group
vsphere_compute_cluster_vm_group
vsphere_compute_cluster_vm_host_rule

Virtual machines to Virtual machines: Terraform resource:
vsphere_compute_cluster_vm_dependency_rule

vSphere Compute clusters also allow you to create Overrides for individual objects. Terraform has 3 separate resources; to add a DPM override to a cluster for an ESXi hosts and to add DRS and HA overrides for virtual machines.
vsphere_dpm_host_override
vsphere_drs_vm_override
vsphere_ha_vm_override

Before showing examples, a few words about the flow of work. If you are working in a greenfield (that is adding resources), the flow is:
– add new resource(s) to the Terraform configuration file,
– run terraform plan and
– run terraform apply.

If you need to import existing cluster rules, the flow is a bit more complicated:

• Add new resource(s) to the Terraform configuration file. In some cases you can start with a basic configuration and add additional code after importing the resource
• Import the new resource
• Run terraform plan to detect missing parts
• Update the configuration file in case of errors or missing parts
• Run terraform plan again to check the configuration. If everything went well, terraform plan end with “No changes”

BTW, if you want to import existing cluster rules, you can run a PowerShell script like this to gather info.

Terraform and vSphere – Part 3: Import Resources

In the previous post “Terraform and vSphere – part 2: DSC”, we ended with a cluster created by Terraform called “Cluster-02” and showed that despite minimal configuration, all settings can be monitored by Terraform.

However, there is also a cluster “Cluster-01” in this Datacenter that was manually configured at the time. We would also like to manage this cluster with Terraform, together with our new Cluster.
Fortunately, Terraform offers an option for this too, how that works we will show in this post.

In the previous post, we ended with code for creating a cluster called Cluster-02. Before proceeding with adding Cluster-01, we check the current configuration by running the following command:

$ terraform plan

It should report: No changes
Now add the following lines to the code, these three lines is the minimum for starting the import of  cluster Cluster-01.

 
# Existing Cluster to be imported
resource "vsphere_compute_cluster" "compute_cluster1" {
  name            = "Cluster-01"
  datacenter_id   = data.vsphere_datacenter.dc.id
}

Terraform and vSphere – Part 2: DSC

Desired State monitoring with Terraform?

Some time ago, I wrote a post about Terraform and vSphere. In this post, I showed how appliances (.ova files) can be deployed with Terraform. Another use case for Terraform is deploying virtual machines from templates.
But with this, we would almost forget the most important use of Terraform, deploying vSphere Infrastructure, in Terraform terminology resources like Clusters, vSwitches, Datastores and more. In doing so, I discovered an interesting feature of Terraform.
I’ve long been interested in configuration management for vSphere, see older posts on Vester and DSC Resources for VMware.

In a nutshell, Configuration Management is a systematic process for setting and maintaining the configuration of a resource over its lifetime.
In my experience, maintaining it during its lifetime is the trickiest part.
And that is where Terraform differs from other tools I have seen in recent years. As an example, we compare the configuration of a Compute Cluster in a vCenter Server using “DSC Resources for VMware” (see the example in this post) on the one hand and Terraform on the other.
A simple DSC configuration for creating a Cluster may look like this:

Configuration DCKoedood {
    Import-DscResource -ModuleName VMware.vSphereDSC -ModuleVersion 2.2.0.84

    vSphereNode $AllNodes.NodeName {

        Datacenter "DCKoedood" {
            Name = 'DCKoedood'
            Location = [string]::Empty
            Ensure = 'Present'
        }

        Cluster "Cluster-02" {
            Name = 'Cluster-02'
            Location = [string]::Empty
            DatacenterName = 'DCKoedood'
            DatacenterLocation = [string]::Empty
            Ensure = 'Present'
            HAEnabled = $true
            DrsEnabled = $true
            DependsOn = "[Datacenter]DCKoedood"
        }
   }
}

Log Insight 8.8.2 – API update

I wrote it in my previous post “In addition, Log Insight has an even larger number of APIs with “Tech Preview” status.”.
“Tech Preview” status also means in VMware’s words “Their design or implementation may change without warning and should not be depended on. A tech preview API may become supported, have forwards-incompatible changes or be removed during an upgrade.“.
And that is exactly what has happened with the release of Log Insight version 8.8.2 and the API endpoint for groups and roles.

By the way, have you also noticed that the Log Insight API has been a version 2 for some time now? To be exact, since the release of Log Insight version 8.6.0.

In version 8.8.2 endpoint /api/v2/user-groups replaces the /api/v2/authgroups. On the positive side, the way to assign roles to a group has been improved, as we will see later.

Using snippets of PowerShell code, basic operations according to the CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) schema are shown for Directory groups and Roles.
First, the code for setting up a session with the Log Insight API, the code is written for PowerShell Core 7.x. The variable $vLISessionHeader is part of the Invoke-Restmethod cmdlet used in the other examples.

Log Insight – automating Groups and Roles

Important: The examples described in this blog are applicable for Log Insight version 8.8.0 and below, but no longer function in version 8.8.2 due to changes in the API. More on this in a forthcoming post.

Adding Directory Groups

A little while ago I wrote about a poc how to use Ansible and a pipeline to upgrade Log Insight. Shortly thereafter, I looked at the capabilities of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (from now on: vRSLCM) and did deployments of Log Insight and vRealize Operations Manager. vRLSCM can take care of some of the configuration of Log Insight, such as NTP, DNS, authentication and Cluster VIPs, in addition to the deployment. Configuration of Directory Groups and Roles, also important, is (currently) not included. If you want to automate the whole process of deployment and configuration of Log Insight, additional action is needed.
In this post, I’ll show you how to configure groups and roles in Log Insight 8.8.0 with PowerShell 5.x but also with Ansible 2.12.6 (a better understanding of Ansible, is one of my goals for this year and nothing is better than practice).
The starting point is the documentation of the Log Insight REST API, available at link: https: //<fqdn Log Insight or IP address>/rest-api.
The APIs presented here do have a “Supported” status. In addition, Log Insight has an even larger number of APIs with “Tech Preview” status. The Tech Preview APIs are in most cases incompletely documented.
Available documentation can be found by including the word “internal” in the link: https: //<fqdn Log Insight or IP address>/internal/rest-api.
See also my post Log Insight REST API.

vRSLCM – Exception while validating for Scale-Out

Recently, I have been exploring the capabilities of VMware’s vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (from now on vRSLCM). vRSLCM is a product for deployment, configuration, upgrading & patching, scale-up and scale-out of VMware products like; vRealize Automation, Orchestrator, Operations Manager, Network Insight, Log Insight and Business for Cloud. See this link for more information.

I usually do this by first installing the product and then running various scenarios, such as this one for Log Insight:
1. Deploy a 3 node Log Insight cluster, version 8.6.0
2. Upgrade to version 8.6.2
3. Scale-Out, by adding an extra worker node to the cluster

My first attempt adding an extra worker node to the existing Log Insight cluster ended, after choosing “ADD COMPONENTS”, with the following message:

Fig. 1

The existing Log Insight nodes were up and running, so what happened?
A log file named /var/log/vrlcm/vmware_vrlcm.log was very useful and explains what is happening during this action, see the following lines:

2022-05-26 12:57:06.750 INFO  [pool-3-thread-20] c.v.v.l.p.v.VrliScaleoutOvaValidationTask -  -- vRLI instance :: {
  "vrliHostName" : "vRLI-1.virtual.local",
  "port" : "9543",
  "username" : "admin",
  "password" : "JXJXJXJX",
  "provider" : "Local",
  "agentId" : null
}
2022-05-26 12:57:09.817 ERROR [pool-3-thread-20] c.v.v.l.d.v.r.c.VRLIRestClient -  -- Failed to get the vRLI authentication token. No route to host (Host unreachable)
2022-05-26 12:57:12.889 ERROR [pool-3-thread-20] c.v.v.l.p.v.VrliScaleoutOvaValidationTask -  -- Exception while validating the vRLI VA OVA for Scaleout : 

Port 9543 is used while communicating with the Log Insight API, the “Failed to get the vRLI authentication token” makes it clear that communication with the primary node, named vRLI-1.virtual.local, is not possible, hence the “No route to the host”. A ping command from the vRSLCM to the primary node by hostname, yields no results and is a confirmation that the DNS registration has gone haywire.

After the DNS registration is restored, the primary node is resolvable again and the scale-out can be continued.

Bottom line, when you see this message, check DNS and/or network connectivity to the targets.

Log Insight Duplicate Webhooks

After upgrading Log Insight to version 8.4.x, something strange happened, let me explain.
Log Insight has the ability to forward Alerts for further processing via a Webhook. For some information about usage of Webhooks, see this post.

Webhooks are configured separately and can be used hereafter in the configuration of an Alert as a notification option, whether or not in combination with email address(es).

Fig. 1 – Alert with email configured, webhook not yet selected