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VMware announced GA of vSphere 4.1 product this Tuesday. Here is the official what’s new in vSphere 4.1. Many bloggers already covered different aspects of the product itself: VMware vSphere 4.1: Advancing the Platform for Cloud Computing, Useful vSphere 4.1 knowledgebase articles, vSphere 4.1 released, Release: VMware vSphere 4.1, etc. I don’t repeat these here, but focus on the new APIs in 4.1 release.

In general, the APIs are the programatic “view” of features. Understanding the features helps a lot on understanding the APIs. So I strongly encourage you to read new features of the product itself. Note that not all the new features especially the performance and scalability features are explicitly reflected in API signatures.

vSphere API 4.1 introduces 7 new managed object types:

• HostActiveDirectoryAuthentication
• HostAuthenticationManager
• HostAuthenticationStore
• HostDirectoryStore
• HostLocalAuthentication
• HostPowerSystem
• StorageResourceManager

vSphere 4.1 adds 23 new methods to 10 existing managed object types:

vSphere API 4.1 also adds 8 properties to 6 existing managed object types:

There is one method signature change in the PowerOnMultiVM defined in Datacenter managed object with an additional parameter called option. If you use Web Service directly, your code may break.

Associated with the changes of the managed object types are the additions/changes of the data objects, enumerated type, and fault types. You don’t need to know these changes before you get to them from the managed object types introduced above.

The support of vSphere 4.1 is already done in vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 beta. I will merge the code and push it to sourceforge code repository very soon. Please stay tuned for the announcement.