Any plans on replacing rbvmomi?

areyus · November 18, 2022, 10:56am

Hi everyone,

in July 2021, VMWare has officially discontinued the rbvmomi gem. (Update README.md · vmware-archive/rbvmomi@fb3caa9 · GitHub)
From what I understand by looking at VMWare related isues (like Bug #27670: Update rbvmomi to support new VMware hardware versions and guest OSes - Packaging - Foreman and Bug #34498: CentOS9 and RHEL9 Guest OS are missing - Foreman), this means we cannot get access to new GuestOS definitions and VMWare hardware versions.
The Windows team at my company has been complaining for a while that we cannot deploy VMs with current Windows releases set as GuestOS by default, and from the issues I linked it looks like this will be the case for RHEL9 too and also new HW Versions in future VSphere releases.
Are there any plans for replacing that gem or forking it or something similar? If not, what would be the other options?

ekohl · November 18, 2022, 11:23am

I think forking rbvmomi is of limited use since it’s based on the old API. AFAIK the new API is REST based. There was actually GitHub - vmware-archive/vsphere-automation-sdk-ruby: DEPRECATED Ruby samples, language bindings, and API reference documentation for vSphere using the VMware REST API but it’s ready deprecated. What’s worse is that their suggested replacement is in Python or Java. This is not a good situation.

ekohl · November 18, 2022, 2:38pm

While discussing this internally I was pointed to a maintained fork:

After updating fog-vsphere to current CI and Ruby support, here’s the PR to switch it over:

I haven’t tested it though.

cintrix84 · November 23, 2022, 3:08pm

I will test this with vcenter 6/7 next week and if it works well, ack @ekohl pr and get a new gem built of fog-vsphere

areyus · January 3, 2023, 1:31pm

@cintrix84 @ekohl
Any news on this?
The PR to fog-vsphere was merged a few weeks ago, can we expect this in Foreman soon?

evgeni · January 3, 2023, 1:42pm