Note: The items and techniques discussed in this post are not supported by VMware.  Before using it in a production VMware View environment, please be sure to test it in a non-production environment. 

Like many of the other product offerings, VMware includes a set of PowerCLI cmdlets that can be used with VMware View.  However, unlike the other PowerCLI cmdlets, there are some significant limits to what can be done with these cmdlets, including:

• They can only be used on the View Connection Server*
• They are feature-limited
• They haven’t been upgraded with the rest of View, so features like View Storage Accelerator/Content-Based Read Cache and VMware Blast cannot be managed from PowerShell

*Note: Scripts utilizing the View PowerCLI commands can be executed via PowerShell Remoting or tools like PSEXEC.  However, the script still needs to be locally stored on the Connection Server.

But there is still one option for working with View.  Although the API for View isn’t as robust as other mainstream VMware products, the primary database is based is LDAP.  This opens up a whole new world of possibilities when trying to automate against VMware View.

Exploring the View LDAP Database

VMware doesn’t provide a lot of information about the View LDAP database in their support documents, and in almost all cases, directly editing entries in LDAP is not supported.  But there is information out there.

A few months ago, I posted a script that worked directly against the View LDAP database to find and remediate desktops that were using the wrong snapshot as a base image.  Other bloggers and community members have put together some scripts that work directly against the LDAP database.  Some of those resources are:

• What’s In the View AD-LDS by Luc Dekens
• VMware View reporting — PowerShell without Broker-based cmdlets — Part 0 – vNugglets
• Check VMware View 4.x Pool Provisioning Status – vpeeling (Note – This is a link to a cached copy on the Wayback Machine. The original site appears to have been down for some time.)
• Disable VMware View Pool using PowerShell PowerCLI – Rob Daniels
• Automating VMware View Pool Membership – vElemental
• Automating Desktop in ‘Already Used’ State in VMware View –Part 2 – Andre Leibovici
• VMware View PowerShell AD LDS Set-State Function – Andre Leibovici

The link to Luc Dekens’ blog contained a very surprising revelation – VMware includes an entire copy of the schema on the Connection Servers.  This can provide a good starting point for working with View’s LDAP database as it does include a description of what each field does.  Some of the descriptions also include accepted and/or default values.

With a default install of VIew, the schema file is located at %ProgramFiles%\VMware\VMware View\Server\LDAP\ldif, and it can be opened with any text editor program.

The existence of this file has already saved me a lot of time.  My initial plan was to actually dive in and map attributes to feature sets by trial-and-error.  I may have to do that for some items, such as the pae-CitrixXMLServicePort attribute, but this provides a rough map of the LDAP layout and what the different attributes control.

This only scratches the surface of what can be done with the LDAP database.  And like a large cave system that has multiple branches and tunnels, the View LDAP database has several containers, entities, and attributes that need to be explored.