Learning the vSphere 6.5 REST API

VMware65RestAPI.ps1

# vSphere 6.5 VCSA - REST API testing

$vCenterName = 'YOURNAMEHERE'
$BaseURI = "https://$vCenterName/rest"

# At first, I could only make this work with vSphere SSO credentials
# Try that if AD auth is throwing 401 Unauthorized errors at you
# (Discovered later that it didn't like the colon in my AD user's password)
# Can also try "https://YOURVCENTER/apiexplorer" in your browser to test login creds
$c = Get-Credential -UserName 'administrator@vsphere.local' -Message 'Enter password'

# Construct Base64 header for Basic Authentication
$utf8 = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($c.UserName+':'+$c.GetNetworkCredential().Password)
$auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($utf8)
$head = @{'Authorization' = "Basic $auth"}

# Receive and store session ID token for further calls
$r = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "$BaseURI/com/vmware/cis/session" -Method Post -Headers $head
$token = (ConvertFrom-Json $r.Content).value
$session = @{'vmware-api-session-id' = $token}

# The fun begins: (looks like you always need to extract the value property from responses?)

# Get compute clusters
(Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$BaseURI/vcenter/cluster" -Method Get -Headers $session).value
# Get hosts
(Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$BaseURI/vcenter/host" -Method Get -Headers $session).value

# "https://YOURVCENTER/apiexplorer" in a browser for all available endpoints

# An example to view all available GET methods in the CLI
# Credit to LucD at http://techgenix.com/vmware-rest-api/
# Note that "/com/vmware" is required here but not for the vcenter REST calls
# Would love to know more about this area of querying available endpoints from the command line
(Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$BaseURI/com/vmware/vapi/metadata/cli/command" -Method Get -Headers $session).value |
    Where-Object Name -eq get | Sort-Object path