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Transform VMware product builds

Current Status

⚠️ The VMware KB API changed which introduced a breaking change for this project. This is tracked in issue #9
⚠️ At the moment, release data is not updated

Intro

This Python code parses VMware product release data from the kb article Correlating build numbers and versions of VMware products (1014508) and transforms them into a machine-readable format.
A combination of parsing with beautiful soup and data handling with Pandas is the used to achieve the goal. A process is scheduled with GitHub actions to run daily, the results will be pushed to the repo Machine-readable VMware release data .

Data standardization

Since v0.1.0 the raw data from the published KB is transformed to establish a standard in terms of column headers, formatting, etc. KB 2143832 (ESXi) is used as the model for providing a standardized information set.

Uniform column names

Columns describing the same data set have different labels, e.g. "Build number", "Build Number", "BuildNumber".
In case of the example, the columns will be renamed to "Build Number" per KB 2143832.

Multi-value columns

Columns may have more than one value, e.g. "Build Number - Version" in KB2143850 (vRealize Automation).
In this case, two additional columns (Version, Build Number) will be added to the table each containing just a single Value.

Merged tables

Roadmap: There may be more than one table that hold the version information, e.g. in KB2143838 (vCenter Server). A merge operation will attempt to provide a unified table.

Nested tables, merged columns/rows

Since v0.2.0: For vCenter build information (KB2143838), this release based on PR #5 offers merged tables: The KB article contains three tables:

  • Release information for VCSA 7
  • Release information for VCSA/Windows VC 6.7
  • Release information for VCSA/Windows before that

The merged output available is now:

  • one table for all VCSA releases
  • one table for all Windows releases
  • one table for all releases Unicode issues are addressed as well

Non-standard tables

Since v0.4.0 the script can handle KB52075 (vxrail). This table has none of the default column names and also multi-line column headers.

Output format and folder structures

The way the output is currently structured is:

  • Directory: based on Pandas options to handle json data orientation
    • Files: KB(a)_(b)_table(c)release_as(d)"
      • a: knowledge base article id - the unique ID for the KB article
      • b: product name - The first product from the meta data, all in lower case and spaces replaced by underscores
      • c: An id to identify multiple html tables on the section (starting at 0)
      • d: json data orientation - see above

Disclaimer

This is not an official VMware repository and in no way linked in official capacity to my employment at VMware.