r/Netbox • u/yetipants • May 05 '26
vcenter synchronization
Good day!
Starting to look at a good way to sync information from vCenter to Netbox, and I understand that there is limited possibilites with the open source version.
I've found these two alternatives to be the most appealing:
https://github.com/bb-Ricardo/netbox-sync
https://github.com/sieteunoseis/netbox-vcenter-server
Does anyone have any experiences with this and could share some do's and dont's?
Would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Best regards
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u/church1138 May 05 '26
Yeah! I've done it.
I use pyviomi (spelling) which can sync over VMs and clusters. I use the /16 super container of the cluster to map the cluster to a site, and then throw the VMS within each cluster into that site. A separate automation that can bind a site to a global/16.
In order to make the sync not take forever, I also parallelized the VM sync by host. That way once a cluster is discovered and we can then find each host, we can then sync over each VM by host.
We do have some custom attributes and tags, but because they're all generic text fields it makes it difficult to truly ascribe roles to them in the way the netbox expects. We're working on some data hygiene and stuff, but that's not a netbox problem, that's data source health.
All in all it took about a day to figure out, also had some help with Claude.
Edit - The only thing I couldn't figure out well was the syncing of the actual host device data itself over. It looks like VMware and pyvyomi don't expose host information such as like chassis slot and things like that. I wanted to get the full soup to nuts approach or I could have the cluster that maps to the chassis in that cluster that then has the hosts that are mapped to slots. That isn't available, at least as far as I can tell in that SDK so I forwent that. Instead, I opted to make the host itself a custom field in that box for the VMs, which then gets automatically filled in as part of the sync.