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If you have ever used vSphere Web Service API, you must have known that there is no managed object but ManagedObjectReference object. Understanding it helps deepen your understanding of the vSphere API.

Honestly, the ManagedObjectReference is a little confusing by itself. It is in fact a data object but represents a managed object. You can think of a MOR as a pointer in some sense because it’s used to uniquely identify a managed object. Even better, you can think of the “type” and “value” defined in the MOR in the SQL way. The type is like a table name, and the value like the primary key which can uniquely identify a managed object in its type.

MOR is really intended to be used by program and should be carefully limited to the scope of where it comes from. That is why it’s hidden from application developers in vSphere Java API.

Anyway, let’s see how to get hold of MOR objects: 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 Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.