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As of version 2.6-RC1 of the EIS RESTful API, we introduced the /<vm_uiid>/spec resource to provide an interface to dump any virtual machine specification in JSON format. The idea behind this, is to deploy a new virtual machine based on a given VM shell or to deploy a new VM with almost the same configuration. You may wonder what might be the difference between taking this approach and requesting a VM clone and basically, deployment time and flexibility. A clone might take longer to deploy and already provisioned disks cannot be shrunken.

Step-by-step guide

1. Make a request to /v2/vm/<vm_uuid>/spec where vm_uuid is the uuid of the VM you wish to get the specifications:

   Code Block
   http -a $TK GET "https://vss-api.eis.utoronto.ca:8001/v2/vm/5012ae29-6cfa-c7fd-3d40-46555cbefec0/spec"

   If you specify the "-d" flag in httpie, you'll be able to redirect the output to a file as follows:

   Code Block

   http -a $TK GET "https://vss-api.eis.utoronto.ca:8001/v2/vm/5012ae29-6cfa-c7fd-3d40-46555cbefec0/spec" -d HTTP/1.1 200 OK Allow: HEAD, OPTIONS, GET Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 815 Content-Type: application/json Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2016 14:21:52 GMT Server: nginx Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000 X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff X-Frame-Options: DENY X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000 X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4985 X-RateLimit-Reset: 1475506800 Downloading 815.00 B to "spec.json" Done. 815.00 B in 0.00056s (1.40 MB/s)

2. The output file spec.json would look something like:

   Code Block
   language py collapse true
   { "data": { "domain": "domain-c5877", "description": "Testing python wrapper", "admin_phone": "416-577-7061", "admin_name": "VSS CI", "networks": [ "dvportgroup-92" ], "name": "loving_colden", "bill_dept": "EIS", "disks": [ 40.0 ], "inform": "vss-ci@eis.utoronto.ca", "built_from": "os_install", "memory": 2.0, "usage": "Test", "folder": "group-v7350", "admin_email": "vss-ci@eis.utoronto.ca", "os": "ubuntu64Guest", "cpu": 2 }, "meta": { "count": 16, "user": "jm", "time": "0.37097s" }, "_links": { "self": "https://vss-api.eis.utoronto.ca:8001/v2/vm/5012ae29-6cfa-c7fd-3d40-46555cbefec0/spec", "vm": "https://vss-api.eis.utoronto.ca:8001/v2/vm/5012ae29-6cfa-c7fd-3d40-46555cbefec0" } }

3. By removing the meta and links keys in the file and just leaving a plain JSON object you could use spec.json as your payload for the new vm deployment as follows:

   Code Block
   language py collapse true
   { "domain": "domain-c5877", "description": "Testing python wrapper", "admin_phone": "416-577-7061", "admin_name": "VSS CI", "networks": [ "dvportgroup-92" ], "bill_dept": "EIS", "disks": [ 10.0, 10.0 ], "inform": "vss-ci@eis.utoronto.ca", "built_from": "os_install", "memory": 1.0, "usage": "QA", "folder": "group-v7350", "admin_email": "vss-ci@eis.utoronto.ca", "os": "ubuntu64Guest", "cpu": 2 }

   Note
   In the previous code block, both keys have been already removed. Also, the specification has been modified by adding one 10G disk, reducing memory to 1GB, updating the usage to QA and removed its name to get a random name.

4. Submitting a new VM request would be as simple as making a POST request to the /v2/vm resource having spec.json as input.

   Code Block
   http -a $TK POST https://vss-api.eis.utoronto.ca:8001/v2/vm < spec.json

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