[Feat] - Get tags of VM from vSphere SDK Client

[oijkn]

With the previous code, the tags did not appear when I did the salt-call vmware_vm.info <minion> command.

By adding the vSphere SDK Client, the tags are ok in the return of the command.

Important: it is mandatory to install the new dependencies.

pip3 install --upgrade git+https://github.com/vmware/vsphere-automation-sdk-python.git

[waynew]

@oijkn thanks for the PR!

I was under the impression that tags were get-able with our current approach but maybe that's a specific version of vSphere or something.

A couple of things - first, tests are required for all code contributions. Meaningful unit tests are fine, but unit+integration are better. If you need help with writing tests - attend one of the Test Clinics on Twitch, and we'll be happy to help you get started 👍. We also want a changelog entry

But more importantly, the vSphere SDK is a very finicky dependency. It has a known issue about pip-installing for a very long time. Almost a decade long.

I've seen that dependency cause a number of issues in upstream Salt, which gives me very very strong reservations about making it a dependency of our project.

I'm OK with making it an optional dependency that's basically completely isolated. Something to this effect:

import utils.vsphere_sdk


...

    tags = utils.vsphere_sdk.get_tags(vm)

Then it could do something like this:

try:
    from com.vmware.vapi.std_client import DynamicID
    HAS_VSPHERE_SDK = True
except ImportError:
    HAS_VSPHERE_SDK = False


def get_tags(vm):
    if HAS_VSPHERE_SDK:
        try:
            vm_mid = vm._moId
            ...
            tags = [client.tagging.Tag.get(tag).name for tag in tags_list]
        except Exception:  # not sure if this try/except is necessary
            tags = []
    else:
        tags = [tag.name for tag in vm.tag]
    return tags

The create_vsphere_client would also need to be similarly protected. Honestly, I wouldn't put the api_client in connect - I'd keep it completely isolated in the vsphere_sdk module. That's just because of the number of issues I've seen using the SDK.

If we can't get the tags any other way 🤷 we can go ahead and provide the ability here. But if someone can't install the SDK, or it gives some issues, then we shouldn't be broken -- we should just carry on as normal, though we can log at an info or warning level or something, if that's useful.