In keeping with my recent VMware Flings interest, Onyx, has been another one of those Flings that’s caught my eye. The name probably accounts for 50% of my interesting—Onyx—just sounds so cool. It sounds like it stands for something important. The geek I am I actually looked it up. It’s Greek, meaning claw or fingernail. eh, ok so not that cool now.
Onyx is an application that can generate output code based on your actions in the vSphere C# client. It can generate four different types of output --Raw Soap Messages, C#, PowerShell, and vCO JavaScript. It achieves this by setting itself up as a proxy between you and the vCenter Server. So Onyx initiates a secure connection to the vCenter server and then you initiate a connection using the C# vSphere Client to Onyx. From that point on everything becomes transparent to you. You can continue to use the vSphere Client to manage vCenter as normal. But now you have the ability to create scriptable code from your actions.
Onyx is designed to work only with the C# Client. It does not work with the Web Client. With the push to the Web Client and no more C# clients in development. This may mean that Onyx now has a finite lifespan to it.
In any case I plan on playing around with Onyx over the coming days. To goal is to see if I can extract meaningful PowerCli and vCO output code to use. As I spend more time with these products on a day to day basis I can see Onyx helping, or at least guiding me into the right direction, when stuck creating workflows and scripts.
Onyx can be found on the VMware Fling page. There is also a VMTN community which has been created for Project Onyx. Both of which can be found in the links below.
Reference Links
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