In my home lab, I try to find little tasks and find a way I can repeat these tasks quicker, easier, and perhaps even more securely. Everything I share can be performed in many different ways, my importance is finding a new way every time.
As a security measure, I chose to leave SSH disabled when deploying my NSX Controllers and now I need to access my managers so that I can perform some commands. Rather than typing in a long complicated password in a VMware console, I wanted to execute this via API using Postman. (This also allows me to dig in and learn more about Postman)
If you browse out to the VMware By Broadcom Developer site, API reference documentation is available, simply bring up the site below and you can do a search for ‘SSH’ and you will find the SSH-related API calls.
NSX-T Data Center REST API – VMware API Explorer
The following call will get the status of SSH on an individual NSX manager.
GET https://<nsx-mgr>/api/v1/node/services/ssh/status
If you want to review the properties of the SSH configuration, run the following
GET https://<nsx-mgr>/api/v1/node/services/ssh
For the final step, we want to finally enable SSH on the controller by running
POST https://<nsx-mgr>/api/v1/node/services/ssh?action=start
and we are in
Reference the API Documentation listed at the beginning of the article, the commands are relatively the same just have parameters for ‘stop’, ‘start’, or ‘restart’
