Manage Floppy Images wit the vss-cli

In some operating systems, such as the most recent versions of Windows, you need to provide the device drivers to properly recognize basic devices like the VMXNET3 network adapter or Paravirtual SCSi controllers. These drivers are provided by VMware and now, they are available for you to use on demand by the floppy command vss-cli compute floppy.

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

  Available floppy 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

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

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

  List available Floppy images in the VSS central store.

  Filter by path or name path=<path> or name=<name>. For example:

      vss-cli compute floppy ls -f name=like,pv% -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 Windows drivers image, the command should be something like:

vss-cli compute floppy public ls -f name=like,%Windows%

path                                          name
--------------------------------------------  ----------------------
[] /vmimages/floppies/pvscsi-Windows2008.flp  pvscsi-Windows2008.flp
[] /vmimages/floppies/pvscsi-Windows2003.flp  pvscsi-Windows2003.flp
[] /vmimages/floppies/pvscsi-WindowsXP.flp    pvscsi-WindowsXP.flp

The process of mounting the image to a VM is the same: first get the VM UUID and then execute vss-cli compute vm set <name-or-uuid> floppy <unit> --image <path> as shown below:

vss-cli compute vm set 501257e0-81f5-9c2a-84e5-e900212fef76 floppy 1 --image "[] /vmimages/floppies/pvscsi-Windows2008.flp"

Personal

The floppy command resource also provides available .flp images from your VSKEY-STOR space, so you are free to upload any custom floppy image and mount it to a Virtual Machine.

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

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

  Available Floppy images in your personal VSKEY-STOR space.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  ls    list personal Floppy images
  sync  Sync personal Floppy images

In order to list or load a user Floppy into a VM, 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.

Note

Assuming you have already uploaded a file, the command vss-cli compute floppy personal sync should be executed.

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

vss-cli compute floppy personal ls

path                                    name
--------------------------------------  ----------
[vssUser-xfers] jm/floppies/pvscsi.flp  pvscsi.flp

The process of mounting the image to a VM is the same: first get the VM UUID and then execute vss-cli compute vm set <name-or-uuid> floppy <unit> --image <path> as shown below:

vss-cli compute vm set 501257e0-81f5-9c2a-84e5-e900212fef76 floppy 1 --image "[vssUser-xfers] jm/floppies/pvscsi.flp"

Note

Every time a new floppy image file has been added or removed from your VSKEY-STOR account, please run vss-cli compute floppy personal sync to update your account records.