Blog from September, 2022

VSS Command Line Interface (vss-cli) v2022.9.0
JM Lopez posted on Sept 28, 2022

VSS-CLI v2022.9.0 is available for download via PyPI or GitLab. Latest version includes the following improvements and bug fixes:

Improvements

compute vm mk --storage-type: to set preferred storage type during deployment (#553)

Commands

  • compute vm mk shell

  • compute vm mk from-clib

  • compute vm mk from-clone

  • compute vm mk from-image

  • compute vm mk from-spec

  • compute vm mk from-template

Description

We have improved the storage selection for deployment in the ITS Private Cloud API to make it simpler and more specific with respect to the type. Each compute cluster aka Domain, has at least two storage clusters: SSD and HDD backed.

With this improvements, the vss-cli allows to specify the type of backing storage to use in a new virtual machine deployment from: ssd and hdd. Based on your selection, the ITS Private Cloud API will prioritize based on certain criteria the virtual instance deployment. For instance:

The limit for a VM to be on SSDs is 6TiB. 

vss-cli --wait compute vm mk shell -d 'InfluxDB instance for performance counters' \
--os ubuntu64Guest --folder group-v4122 -b Client \
--scsi '{"type": "paravirtual", "bus": 0}' \
--disk '{"capacity_gb": 10, "bus": 0}' \
--disk '{"capacity_gb": 200, "bus": 0}'  \
--cpu 4 --memory 8 --net 463186 \
--iso Ubuntu-22.04 \
--tpm --firmware efi \
--storage-type ssd \
--power-on \ 
influx-001

Setup auto-completion and the --storage-type option could be auto-completed with a couple of tabs.

After completing, let’s verify the storage type influx-001 uses:

vss-cli --columns "moref,name,disks[*].label,storage_type" compute vm ls -f name=influx-001
moref      name              disks[*].label            storage_type
---------  ----------------  ------------------------  --------------
vm-564792  2209T-influx-001  Hard disk 1, Hard disk 2  ssd

compute vm get spec: adds storage-type to vss-cli spec (#556)

compute vm mk from-spec: adds storage-type support to vss-cli spec (#557)

core: update pyvss to 2022.9.0. (#554)

core: update pick to 2.0.2. (#555)

Upgrade

Remember, VSS-CLI documentation is now available in VSS-CLI and the full Change Log is available http://eis.utoronto.ca/~vss/vss-cli/changelog.html . Upgrade or install VSS-CLI as follows:

# using vss-cli
vss-cli upgrade 

# upgrade with pip
pip install vss-cli --upgrade

# install
pip install vss-cli

For more information, please refer to the official documentation site.