Insights on VMware HCX, Virtualization, and other products

How to enable extra settings in HCX that PowerCLI cannot (yet) – Part II

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graemeash1
in ,

OK, so in the last blog we looked at enabling a ‘Traffic Tag’ and the ‘Secure’ profile check box for a new Network Profile.

The problem was that the code was very limited in scope, i.e. only worked if all your ducks were in a line.

What if you have a stray duck? Well thats the topic of this blog.

Previously the script would update the existing object in the imported JSON:

$jsonstring.Security.isSecure = $true
$jsonstring.objectId = ""
$jsonstring.recommendationTags = "management","uplink","replication","vmotion","fleet"

Thats all well and good if it exists! If you use PowerCLI to create a Network Profile, that object does not exist by default.

Additionally, selecting more than one tag is not as simple as applying a comma separated string to the object, you will find you get some nasty JSON results.
OK, so what do we do?

Lets make a new function so we can reuse the code.
As an input we take the API JSON response we wish to edit.

We then convert it into an object for manipulation.

Lets look and some new code below:

Tags

Before we create it we want to check if we have any Tags defined in our $tags variable to even add in the first place.

Well, where are those Tag choices coming from? That would be the NetworkProfiles.csv file used with the script.

At the bottom are 2 rows:

  • Tags – management,uplink,replication,vmotion,fleet
  • Secure – true / false

If not, just create and empty object as shown:

Tags,"management","uplink,replication","vmotion","vmotion","management","uplink","vmotion","replication"
Secure,"true","true","true","true","true","true","true","true"

The $tags variable reads the relevant CSV column based on the network profile it is working on:

$tags = $ProfileHashtable.Tags[$ProfileNumber]

Then we simply pass that $tags variable to the HCX_CreateNetProfile function:

HCX_CreateNetProfile -hcxAuthToken $hcxAuthToken -NetProfileName $name -TrafficTags $tags -SecureProfile $iSSecure

Adding Tags

We want to create the tag parent object if it doesn’t exist:

If the $tags variable does have one or more entries, we want to create those as separate JSON entries with a loop:

Thats should fix it………..