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VMware TechExchange will take place in San Francisco in the same location of VMworld 2010 from August 30 to September 1st. If you want to learn VMware technologies especially APIs/SDKs including Spring framework, Zimbra, and etc., you should join us. I will present best practices on using VMware vSphere APIs. Hopefully we will GA the vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 by then.

To convince your boss, please read the blog Pablo just wrote:

vSphere 4.1 APIs has some significant improvements, specifically around the Property Collector and AD authentication. We will have sessions to update you on what has changed, provide best practices when using them and hear from our engineers who have hands on experience working with our APIs.  See our latest sessions added Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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In vSphere 4.1, several properties and types have been deprecated. The following table from vSphere Web Services SDK 4.1 release note lists each deprecated API element and its replacement.

Name of deprecated type, method, or property	As of vSphere API 4.1, use instead…
Methods
PropertyCollector.CheckForUpdates	PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx
PropertyCollector.RetrieveProperties	PropertyCollector.RetrievePropertiesEx
PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdates	PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx
VirtualMachine.AcquireMksTicket	VirtualMachine.AcquireTicket
Data Objects
VirtualMachineMksTicket	VirtualMachineTicket
Data Object Properties
ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.enabled	ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.vmMonitoring
HostCapability.replayUnsupportedReason	HostCapability.replayCompatibilityIssues
VirtualDisk.shares	StorageIOAllocationInfo.shares
VirtualMachineRuntimeInfo.memoryOverhead	PerformanceManager memory overhead counter

Note that the release note has much more information that you should really read through if you use vSphere 4.1 API.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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In my last blog, I discussed how to optimize workloads across the cloud. This is based on the assumption that you already have an existing infrastructure. What if you don’t have an existing cloud infrastructure but would like to design one from scratch? Here is what you should be thinking about to get the most from your new cloud.

But first let’s take a look at other types of infrastructures – say a road. When you design a new road, you have to collect data such as population densities around the area, people’s working schedules, what types of vehicles will run on the road, and so on. With that information, you can decide how many lanes you want, what kind of road surface is required, and so on. You don’t just make up the design specification from scratch, and lay down an eight-lane freeway everywhere.

The same process applies in designing the cloud infrastructure as well. Unfortunately this is not what we see often today.

Top-down approach

In my previous blog , I said infrastructure is a means and application is the end. We need to drive the design cloud architecture from the application perspective. This is what I call the top-down approach. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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Cloud computing hasn’t changed the nature of computing – it just changed provisioning and management. That’s important to remember because workloads in the cloud are very much similar to what we see in traditional computing infrastructures. To get the most out of your investment in cloud services or in your own physical IT infrastructure, you need to understand how to optimize workloads.

Workload Categorization

Typical computing workloads involve four basic parts: computation, memory, networking, and storage. Almost all applications have these four parts but mostly not balanced.

Now let’s quickly review the essential categories of application workloads: Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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The following tables list all the managed object types in VI 3.5, vSphere 4 and 4.1. A short description is provided for each type explaining its major responsibilities.

Note that the managed object types are added in an incremental way. The types in older versions are still supported in newer versions. The complete types in a verion include ones in the correpsonding table plus all the ones in all older version tables.

Hope this post gives you a high level overview of functionalities of the vSphere APIs. Check out other blogs such as best practices (1-5, 6-10) on how to use them in general. And don’t forget my book which introduces them extensively with many read to use samples.

Table 1 Managed Object Types in VI 3.5 Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.