title: "Bulk Import vSphere dvPortGroups to phpIPAM" # Title of the blog post.
date: 2022-02-04 # Date of post creation.
# lastmod: 2022-01-21T15:24:00-06:00 # Date when last modified
description: "I wrote a Python script to interface with the phpIPAM API and import a large number of networks exported from vSphere for IP management." # Description used for search engine.
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I [recently wrote](/tanzu-community-edition-k8s-homelab/#a-real-workload---phpipam) about getting started with VMware's [Tanzu Community Edition](https://tanzucommunityedition.io/) and deploying [phpIPAM](https://phpipam.net/) as my first real-world Kubernetes workload. Well I've spent much of my time since then working on a script which would help to populate my phpIPAM instance with a list of networks to monitor.
The first step in making this work was to figure out which networks I wanted to import. We've got hundreds of different networks in use across our production vSphere environments. I focused only on those which are portgroups on distributed virtual switches since those configurations are pretty standardized (being vCenter constructs instead of configured on individual hosts). These dvPortGroups bear a naming standard which conveys all sorts of useful information, and it's easy and safe to rename any dvPortGroups which _don't_ fit the standard (unlike renaming portgroups on a standard virtual switch).
The standard naming convention is `[Site/Description] [Network Address]{/[Mask]}`. So the networks (across two virtual datacenters and two dvSwitches) look something like this:
![Production dvPortGroups approximated in my testing lab environment](dvportgroups.png)
Some networks have masks in the name, some don't; and some use an underscore (`_`) rather than a slash (`/`) to separate the network from the mask . Most networks correctly include the network address with a `0` in the last octet, but some use an `x` instead. And the VLANs associated with the networks have a varying number of digits. Consistency can be difficult so these are all things that I had to keep in mind as I worked on a solution which would make a true best effort at importing all of these.
As long as the dvPortGroup names stick to this format I can parse the name to come up with a description as well as the IP space of the network. The dvPortGroup also carries information about the associated VLAN, which is useful information to have. And I can easily export this information with a simple PowerCLI query:
In my [homelab](/vmware-home-lab-on-intel-nuc-9/), I only have a single vCenter. In production, we've got a handful of vCenters, and each manages the hosts in a given region. So I can use information about which vCenter hosts a dvPortGroup to figure out which region a network is in. When I import this data into phpIPAM, I can use the vCenter name to assign [remote scan agents](https://github.com/jbowdre/phpipam-agent-docker) to networks based on the region that they're in. I can also grab information about which virtual datacenter a dvPortGroup lives in, which I'll use for grouping networks into sites or sections.
It's not pretty, but it'll do the trick. All that's left is to export this data into a handy-dandy CSV-formatted file that I can easily parse for import:
![My networks.csv export, including the networks which don't match the naming criteria and will be skipped by the import process.](networks.csv.png)
### Setting up phpIPAM
After [deploying a fresh phpIPAM instance on my Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes cluster](/tanzu-community-edition-k8s-homelab/#a-real-workload---phpipam), there are a few additional steps needed to enable API access. To start, I log in to my phpIPAM instance and navigate to the **Administration > Server Management > phpIPAM Settings** page, where I enabled both the *Prettify links* and *API* feature settings - making sure to hit the **Save** button at the bottom of the page once I do so.
![Enabling the API](server_settings.png)
Then I need to head to the **User Management** page to create a new user that will be used to authenticate against the API:
![New user creation](new_user.png)
And finally, I head to the **API** section to create a new API key with Read/Write permissions:
![API key creation](api_user.png)
I'm also going to head in to **Administration > IP Related Management > Sections** and delete the default sample sections so that the inventory will be nice and empty:
![We don't need no stinkin' sections!](empty_sections.png)
### Script time
Well that's enough prep work; now it's time for the Python3 [script](https://github.com/jbowdre/misc-scripts/blob/main/Python/phpipam-bulk-import.py):
The script will print out a little descriptive bit about what sort of networks it's going to try to import and then will straight away start processing the file to identify the networks, vCenters, VLANs, and datacenters which will be imported:
```
Importing networks from /home/john/networks.csv...
It then starts prompting for the additional details which will be needed:
```
Region name for vCenter vcsa:
Labby
Comma-separated list of nameserver IPs in Lab vCenter:
192.168.1.5
Fully-qualified domain name of the phpIPAM host:
ipam-k8s.lab.bowdre.net
Username with read/write access to ipam-k8s.lab.bowdre.net:
api-user
Password for api-user:
App ID for API key (from https://ipam-k8s.lab.bowdre.net/administration/api/):
api-user
Use per-region remote scan agents instead of a single local scanner? (y/N):
y
```
Up to this point, the script has only been processing data locally, getting things ready for talking to the phpIPAM API. But now, it prompts to confirm that we actually want to do the thing (yes please) and then gets to work:
```
Proceed with importing 10 networks to ipam-k8s.lab.bowdre.net? (y/N):
y
Authenticating to https://ipam-k8s.lab.bowdre.net/api/api-user...
[AUTH_SUCCESS] Authenticated successfully!
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 20 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 30 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 40 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 1610 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 1620 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 1630 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 1640 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 1650 created.
[VLAN_CREATE] VLAN 1660 created.
[SECTION_CREATE] Section Labby created.
[SECTION_CREATE] Section Lab created.
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 192.168.1.0/24
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.16.10.0/24
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.16.20.0/24
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.16.30.0/24
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.16.40.0/24
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.16.50.0/24
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.16.60.0/24
[SECTION_CREATE] Section Other Lab created.
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.20.10.0/27
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.20.10.32/27
[SUBNET_CREATE] Created subnet 172.20.10.64/26
[FINISH] Created 10 of 10 networks.
```
Success! Now I can log in to my phpIPAM instance and check out my newly-imported subnets:
![New subnets!](created_subnets.png)
Even the one with the weird name formatting was parsed and imported correctly:
![Subnet details](subnet_detail.png)
So now phpIPAM knows about the vSphere networks I care about, and it can keep track of which vLAN and nameservers go with which networks. Great! But it still isn't scanning or monitoring those networks, even though I told the script that I wanted to use a remote scan agent. And I can check in the **Administration > Server management > Scan agents** section of the phpIPAM interface to see my newly-created agent configuration.
![New agent config](agent_config.png)
... but I haven't actually *deployed* an agent yet. I'll do that by following the same basic steps [described here](/tanzu-community-edition-k8s-homelab/#phpipam-agent) to spin up my `phpipam-agent` on Kubernetes, and I'll plug in that automagically-generated code for the `IPAM_AGENT_KEY` environment variable:
I kick it off with a `kubectl apply` command and check back a few minutes later (after the 15-minute interval defined in the above YAML) to see that it worked, the remote agent scanned like it was supposed to and is reporting IP status back to the phpIPAM database server:
![Newly-discovered IPs](discovered_ips.png)
I think I've got some more tweaks to do with this environment (why isn't phpIPAM resolving hostnames despite the correct DNS servers getting configured?) but this at least demonstrates a successful proof-of-concept import thanks to my Python script. Sure, I only imported 10 networks here, but I feel like I'm ready to process the several hundred which are available in our production environment now.
And who knows, maybe this script will come in handy for someone else. Until next time!