VMware Debug

Disclaimer: Community-maintained open-source project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by VMware, Inc. or Broadcom Inc. "VMware" and "vSphere" are trademarks of Broadcom. Source is publicly auditable under the MIT license.

The diagnostic brain of the VMware skill family. You bring the symptom (an error, a log dump, a slow VM); this skill runs a systematic investigation, correlates events from the other skills into one timeline, ranks root-cause hypotheses, and tells you what to check next. It never touches vSphere — it connects to nothing and never executes fixes; its only writes are to a local case ledger under $OPS_HOME. Remediation is routed to vmware-aiops (single op) or vmware-pilot (multi-step, gated), mirroring the vmware-harden → vmware-pilot advisor/executor split.

See skills/vmware-debug/SKILL.md for the full methodology, the event-envelope contract, and symptom routing.

Upgrading to 2.0

2.0 renames 13 of its 14 MCP tools so every name starts with a verb (e.g. case_close → close_case, case_get → get_case, case_grade → grade_case). The full old → new table is in RELEASE_NOTES.md. Nothing else changes: same tools, parameters, safety gates and CLI commands. If an agent prompt, script or ~/.vmware/rules.yaml names a tool, update it — though deny rules written with the old names keep working with vmware-policy ≥ 1.18.1 (vmware-audit policy lists any rule the renames widened), and vmware-pilot ≥ 1.13 translates old names in saved workflows. If an install older than 2.0 shares that rules.yaml, give it vmware-policy ≥ 1.18.2 too: it matches each rule against both the old and the new name, so one file serves both.

MCP tools (14 — 7 read, 7 write)

The seven writes go to the local case ledger only; none reaches a VMware system.

Correlation — stateless, for a single look:

Investigation ledger — for an incident you will reason about over time:

Offline / Air-Gapped Install (from source)

This project uses the modern PEP 517 build system (hatchling), so there is no setup.py by design — that is expected, not a missing file. If you cloned the source and hit ERROR: File "setup.py" or "setup.cfg" not found ... editable mode currently requires a setuptools-based build, your pip is older than 21.3 and cannot do an editable (-e) install with a non-setuptools backend. Editable mode is a developer convenience, not needed to run the tool — do one of:

# From the source tree — a normal (non-editable) install builds a wheel:
pip install .              # NOT  pip install -e .

# ...or upgrade pip first, and editable works too:
pip install --upgrade pip && pip install -e .

For a truly air-gapped host, build the wheels on a connected machine and copy them over — the target then needs no network:

# On a connected machine, collect this package + its dependencies as wheels:
pip wheel . -w dist        # → dist/*.whl   (or: uv build, for just this package)

# Copy dist/ to the air-gapped host, then install offline:
pip install --no-index --find-links dist vmware-debug

License

MIT.