Project Onyx : Capture click, make code
Project Onyx: A nice Vmware fling developed by vmware to turn mouse clicks in to command text.
How does it work?
It’s a proxy between your thick client and your vcenter server.
You connect to vcenter via Onyx. Then you use the thick client to connect to the Onyx proxy server
Of importance:
Onyx makes use of direct api calls, rather than powercli.
In the example from the vmware blog, rather than using start-vm to power on a virtual machine,
Onyx will use the API PoweronMultiVM_Task.
http://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2009/11/project-onyx-is-here.html
So why use it?
True there may be a lot of things that are easier to do using some powercli commands, but if there is something that can’t be automated, you are curious, or just need a hint, at what calls to make, it is still a good tool to have in the tool kit.
Where to get it?
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/onyx
Is there support?
There is (inactive) community driven support
https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/automationtools/onyx
Does it work with Vcenter6?
I haven’t test that yet.
Video:
Here is a nice introduction video by Carter Shanklin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bANfdjuH4wk
What type of output?
Powercli.net
Raw Soap messages
c#.net 2.0
vCO javascript
How to connect?
Press the connect button
Enter your vcenter server name
Open viclient
once connected you will see the listening port on the pc where you ran onyx
Connect to that port
In this case
The vi client interface is a little slow since it has to run though the onyx proxy:
Here in the client we can see that I changed the network of one of my vms to not connect on poweron
vSPARROW 