---
title: "First look at the vSphere 6.5 REST API"
date: 2017-03-04
updated: 2025-01-07
author: Martin Ehrnst
section: powershell
categories: [Automation, Powershell]
tags: [api, Powershell, rest, vmware, vsphere]
url: "https://adatum.no/powershell/first-look-at-the-vsphere-6-5-rest-api/"
canonicalUrl: "https://adatum.no/powershell/first-look-at-the-vsphere-6-5-rest-api"
---

The other day I stumbled across  a [blog series by William Lee](http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2017/01/exploring-new-vcsa-vami-api-wpowercli-part-1.html) who delves deep in to how you use the latest vmware vSphere REST API using PowerCLI. Using the language I know best, Powershell I thought I should give this API I try. I have some experience with API use from before as I often use this to do information exchange between systems, but this is my first experince with vCenter.
This post will cover the very basics on how we authenticate and get a list of all VM’s connected to our vCenter server.
You can explore and test all endpoints by this URL https://vcenter/rest/apiexplorer
To get started I declare two variables for the urls / endpoints we going to use. One for vm’s and one for the session endpoint
$VCBaseUri = "https://host/rest/vcenter/vm"
$SessionUri = "https://host/rest/com/vmware/cis/session"
Based on the credential input from the user we will create a base64 encoded string and create a header for the session endpoint.
#Getting cred and creating auth key
$Cred = Get-Credential
$auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Cred.UserName+':'+$Cred.GetNetworkCredential().Password))
$head = @{
  'Authorization' = "Basic $auth"
}
The $head variable now contains a table with your encoded username and password. We will use this authorization header to create a new session. At first i assumed we could authenticate using basic authentication only but after a little investigation I figured we needed to create a session. vmware has documented the endpoint [here](https://vdc-repo.vmware.com/vmwb-repository/dcr-public/1cd28284-3b72-4885-9e31-d1c6d9e26686/9a0dbc46-b15f-47cd-af1d-dc64615b03df/doc/operations/com/vmware/cis/session.create-operation.html)
Using our authorization header we connect to the session endpoint and recieves a token that we use in our session header. From now on. All authentication is with this session token.
the key for our token is ‘vmware-api-session-id’
#Creating a Session

$token = (Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Headers $head -Uri $SessionUri).Value
$session = @{'vmware-api-session-id' = $token}
Finally you can call the VM endpoint and retrieve all your vms by running the following.
#Calling VM endpoint authenticated with the session

$vms = (Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $VCBaseUri -Headers $session -ContentType 'Application/json').Value
To get a single vm by name, you can filter by appending the uri.
/vm?filter.names=web-w2k12"
Hopefully you will have this output showing all vm’s as objects
[![vcenter api powershell vm output](/assets/blog-images/2017/vsphareapiOutput.png)](/assets/blog-images/2017/vsphareapiOutput.png)
 
My complete script now looks like this.
$VCBaseUri = "https://host/rest/vcenter/vm?filter.names=argaste-web-w2k12"
$SessionUri = "https://host/rest/com/vmware/cis/session"

#Getting cred and creating auth key
$Cred = Get-Credential
$auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Cred.UserName+':'+$Cred.GetNetworkCredential().Password))
$head = @{
  'Authorization' = "Basic $auth"
}

#Creating a Session

$token = (Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Headers $head -Uri $SessionUri).Value
$session = @{'vmware-api-session-id' = $token}

#Calling VM endpoint authenticated with the session

$vms = (Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $VCBaseUri -Headers $session -ContentType 'Application/json').Value
 
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