Introduction

After I published my post about importing advanced host properties into vRealize Operations, a colleague told me that it was very nice, but the real kicker would be to somehow import the host profile compliance stature into vRealize Operation. Again, true to his motto “How hard can it be?”, the Viking set out to explore this challenge.

And, yet again, it turned out to be not hard at all. A few lines of Python code did the trick.

What’s a host profile?

Maybe a quick recap of host profiles could be useful. Host profiles were introduced several years ago in vSphere 4.0 and roughly serve three purposes:

1. Work in conjunction with Auto Deploy to allow “stateless” hosts. These hosts don’t need any configuration at the host level, but read their configuration from a host profile when they boot and applies it on-the-fly.
2. Report compliance against a host profile, i.e. list all deviations of host settings from the host profile.
3. Proactively apply a host profile to an existing host to force it into compliance.

Under the hood, a host profile is just a long list of rules describing what the desired settings of a host should be. Host profiles are typically generated from a reference host. You simply select a host you consider correctly configured and vCenter will create all the rules to check and enforce compliance based on that host.

Host profiles and vRealize Operations

I often hear how nice it would be if vRealize Operations could check compliance with host profiles. So often that I decided to give it a try. As you may know, adding new functionality to vRealize Operations is really simple with e.g. Python. Building the host profile functionality required about a 100 lines of code.

Here’s how my script works:

1. List all the host profiles known to a vCenter.
2. Trigger a host profile compliance check. This will check the profile against all the hosts it’s attached to.
3. Scan through the result and send notification events to vRealize Operations for each violation found.
4. Define a symptom that triggers based on the event and compliance alert based on the symptom.

Running the script

For complete information about installing and running the script, refer to the Github site: https://github.com/prydin/vrops-import-hostprops

However, running the script is simple. Create a config file as described on Github and run this command:

python import-host-profiles.py --config path/to/config/file

If you want the check to run periodically, you should put the script in your crontab on Linux or in a scheduled job on Windows. Checking compliance of a large number of hosts take a while, so you should only run the script one or a couple of times per day.

The result

Once you have imported the alert definition and captured some host profile violations, you should see them under the Analysis->Compliance sub tab. It should look something like below. Of course, you can trigger email notifications or webhook notifications based on the compliance alert.

Useful links

Code, installation instructions and manual:

https://github.com/prydin/vrops-import-hostprops