VM Analyzer

This project provides a VM analysis tool that leverages libguestfs inspection capabilities to read the content of a VM and extract information, such as installed software, specific configuration files... It also extracts the VM hardware configuration. The list of files to extract is driven by the manifest.json file.

It is meant to run inside a container. See Usage section.

VDDK

The VM analysis requires VMware Disk Development Kit (VDDK) to stream the disks over the network. Due to VDDK license, we cannot ship it, so you have to download the VDDK tar.gz archive from VMware website and unpack it on the machine that runs the container, e.g. under /opt.

Usage

Note: all paths are hardcoded, because the container image is meant to be part of a Kubernetes operator that will instantiate the pod with the files mounted in the expected path.

To analyze a VM, you will need to provide some information in JSON input file. The following example is all you need for VMware environments.

{
  "vm_uuid": "01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef",
  "authentication": {
    "hostname": "esxi42.example.com",
    "username": "root",
    "password": "secret",
    "fingerprint": "01:23:45:67:89:AB:CD:EF:01:23:45:67:89:AB:CD:EF:01:23:45:56",
    "insecure": true
  }
}

vm_uuid is the UUID of the VM. You will find it as vm.config.uuid.

The authentication is the VMware vSphere API endpoint config. We recommend connecting directly to ESXi host to benefit from the best performance.

When you have the file ready, say /tmp/my_vm.json, we can start the container. In the example, we use podman that allows you to run it as a rootless container. The following command will run the analysis and dump the result on the standard output.

$ podman run \
    -v /tmp/input.json:/data/input.json:Z \
    -v /opt/vmware-vix-disklib-distrib:/opt/vmware-vix-disklib-distrib\
    fdupont-redhat/vm-analyzer:latest