vCenter Simulator for Developing purpose

I’m currently testing PyVmomi, Ansible and other Tools for Automation. The biggest problem is, that I don’t have on my Laptop or other testing enviroment not always a vCenter with enought Hosts, VMs and other Components.

With a little bit of searching I found vcsim. It’s a vCenter API Simulator
https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/tree/master/vcsim

And on the dockerhub I already found a version of vcsim in a container
https://github.com/nimmis/docker-vcsim

So with the following command you can just start a container simulating a vCenter Environment

# default
docker run -d -p 443:443 nimmis/vcsim

# if you need more hosts
docker run -d -p 443:443 nimmis/vcsim --hosts 8

Here are additional options you can use with this docker image

-E, –esxi Simulate ESXi host
-V, –vcenter Simulate vCenter host (default)
-a, -apps (num) Number of virtual apps per compute resource
-c, –cluster (num) Number of clusters (default 1)
–dc, –data-centers (num) Number of datacenters (default 1)
–ds, –data-stores (num) Number of local datastores (default 1)
-f, –folders (num) Number of folders
–hosts (num) Number of hosts per cluster (default 3)
-h, –help This help
–pg, –port-groups (num) Number of port groups (default 1)
–pod, –storage-pods (num) Number of storage pods per datacenter
–pool, –resource-pools (num) Number of resource pools per compute resource
–sh, –standalone-host (num) Number of standalone hosts (default 1)
–trace Trace SOAP
–vm, –virtual-machines (num) Number of virtual machines per resource pool (default 2)

Then you can just use your favorit language to access the vCenter API. In this example I just used PowerCLI

If you access the url /about, you get all the Methods and Type that are supported. (Example with Postman)