Manage Virtual Machine OVA/OVF Images with the vss-cli

The ITS Private Cloud API has the ability to deploy OVA or OVF virtual machines from either our public repository or an Open Virtualization Format file provided by a user and uploaded to VSKEY-STOR, either for a single or multiple deployments.

Public and personal VM images can be managed with the vss-cli compute image command:

Usage: vss-cli compute image [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Available OVA/OVF images in both the VSS central store and your personal
  VSKEY-STOR space.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  personal  Browse current user images
  public    Browse public images

Public

The public repository holds an OVA catalog of common linux distributions such as Ubuntu, VMware PhotonOS and CoreOS optimized for cloud deployment.

Currently, users can only list and use public VM images with vss-cli compute image public ls and those can be filtered and sorted with including the proper options:

Usage: vss-cli compute image public ls [OPTIONS]

  List available OVA/OVF VM images in the VSS central store.

  Filter by name and sort desc. For example:

      vss-cli compute image public ls -f name=like,Cent% -s path asc

Options:
  -f, --filter-by <TEXT TEXT>...  filter list by <field_name>
                                  <operator>,<value>
  -s, --sort <TEXT TEXT>...       sort by <field_name> <asc|desc>
  -a, --show-all                  show all results  [default: False]
  -p, --page                      page results in a less-like format
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

For instance, to look for a publicly available Photon OS image, the command could be something like:

vss-cli compute image public ls -f name=like,%photon% -s path asc

path                                                              name
----------------------------------------------------------------  ----------------------------------
[vss-ISOs] VmImages/photon-os/photon-custom-hw11-2.0-304b817.ova  photon-custom-hw11-2.0-304b817.ova
[vss-ISOs] VmImages/photon-os/photon-custom-hw13-2.0-304b817.ova  photon-custom-hw13-2.0-304b817.ova

To successfully deploy a VM from a public VM image, Path should be added to the VM command.

For further instructions on how to deploy a virtual machine from image, please refer to Deploy Instance from Image.

Personal

User provided VM images can be managed with the vss-cli compute image personal command:

In order to deploy a VM from a provided VM image, users should upload the file to VSKEY-STOR and then execute a sync command to make the image file available in the ITS Private Cloud.

Assuming you have already uploaded the OVA file or OVF+Disks (VMDKs), the command vss-cli compute image personal sync should be executed.

Once you get a confirmation notification (email or message) VM images should be visible through the CLI. To list just execute vss-cli compute image personal ls and the output should look as follows:

For further instructions on how to deploy a virtual machine from image, please refer to Deploy Instance from Image.

Virtualization, Servers and Storage

Manage Virtual Machine OVA/OVF Images with the vss-cli

Analytics

Public

Personal

Related content