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As I mentioned in a previous blog, vSphere(VI) Java API can be used in any JVM languages/frameworks. We have samples in Jython, Groovy, Grail. This weekend I got a sample in JRuby shared by our community member Martin Jackson in the API forum. Thanks Martin!

I think it would be fun to share it with you. If you can write Ruby code, you can take advantage of VI Java API for managing and automating vSphere as well. If you have samples leveraging the API to share, I am happy to hear about it.

Now, let us take a look at Martin’s sample code ported from a VI Java API sample.  Read more... (176 words, estimated 42 secs reading time)

I attended Eclipse Day at Google headquarter today. It’s a great event packed with several great talks.

Mobile application is for sure a hot topic these days. There were several talks on mobile application development like Android Tools for Eclipse by Xavier Ducrohet from Google, Eclipse Sequoyah for Android App Developers by Eric Cloninger from Motorola, Tools for Mobile Web by Paul Beusterien from Symbian Foundation, and EMF for GWT by Ed Merks from Cloudsmith.

While sitting in the talk on Instantiations Eclipse Tools, I learned that Google bought the company 3 weeks ago. I expect Google will soon make WindowsBuilder, a famous WYSIWYG GUI authoring tool, free for GWT users, therefore further drive the adoption of GWT in competition with Flex, SilverLight.  Read more... (268 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)

WIth 2.1 GAed yesterday, I am happy to announce the 3.0 project kicks off officially. For more fun, I picked up a code name for 3.0 release: Crescendo. For folks know music, crescendo means music gets louder and louder. That is where I want to bring the project to. It’s been a huge success for this VMware sponsored open source project. We’ve had 9,000+ downloads, plus 1000+ SVN code sync, after its first debut in 2008.

So where are we going next?

Before answering the question, let’s take a look at the themes of previous releases. The theme of 1.0 was ease of use with full object model and getter methods hiding property collector. The theme of 2.0 was Just Enough High Performance Web Service Engine resulted in not only performance boost, but also clean license with pure BSD, and much smaller footprint and zero memory leak.

Now it’s time to re-visit ease of use again, but from a different perspective. As I discussed early, the learning curve of vSphere API comes from two folds: lack of object model, and complexity of data objects. The 1.0 release solved the problem nicely. Now it’s time to tackle the second one.  Read more... (548 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)

Right after vSphere 4.1 released, VI Java API 2.1 beta supporting vSphere 4.1 was released on July 15. After 40 days, I am pleased to announce GA of the 2.1 release. Many thanks to all vijava community memembers who helped to try 2.1 beta and give feedbacks.

The 2.1 beta is pretty good in terms of quality. I got several emails reporting greeen. I did get several bugs, some of which are carry-overs that should have been fixed in previous releases. Check the end of this blog for a list of bug fixes.

During the beta period, I started a poweredby page which now features 10 companies/products which use vijava API. If you would like your organizations/products included, please let me know.

Enough being said, are you ready to give 2.1 a try? Please feel to download it here. Even you are new to this API, 5 minutes is good enough to have your first HelloVSphere running with this tutorial.  Read more... (190 words, estimated 46 secs reading time)

Many people already know the book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” According to the author Malcolm Gladwell, tipping points are “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” He defines the term as sociological and uses it to explain sociological epidemics.

Three Rules of Epidemics

In his book, Gladwell laid out the “three rules of epidemics” as follows:

1) The Law of the Few.
“The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” The author categorized people into Connectors who link us up with the world; Mavens who are “people we rely upon to connect us with new information;” and Salesmen who are charismatic persuaders.

2) The Stickiness Factor
The specific content of a message that renders its impact memorable.

3) The Power of Context
Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment.

Although the research comes from sociology, I think it applies to technology as well. After all, technology is social. Just think about social networks like Facebook, and the recent success of Apple’s iPad.

If you want your technology to be a huge success, you cannot ignore its social side story. In the end, it is human beings who make decisions regarding any technology adoption or product purchase.  Read more... (662 words, estimated 2:39 mins reading time)

My colleagues and I had a discussion regarding the vApp template. After virtual machine template for virtual machine, you would expect vApp template for vApp and manage it in a similar way from the vSphere Client. But you cannot.

Most of us know that from vSphere Client, you have context menu item allowing you to convert a virtual machine to a template easily with a click. However you cannot find a similar menu item with a vApp. You can choose to convert a virtual machine inside a vApp, but then the converted template will jump out of the vApp container.

Can we have vApp template? The answer is we can, but in a different way.  Read more... (434 words, 2 images, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

According to a recent post by Duncan, there is an issue with password in ESX(i) 4.1. Only the first 8 characters of a password are taken and validated. A VMware KB article offered solutions to this issue.  Read more... (210 words, estimated 50 secs reading time)

There is a recent question asking how to get the type of event from vSphere API in my previous blog. On one hand, you can clearly see the types of events on a vSphere Client, for instance “info”, “warning”, “error”, and “user.” On the other hand, you cannot find any information about the type from a given event itself using vSphere API.

Strictly speaking an event just indicates something has happened. That is it. You can categorize it differently depending on your goal. The Event type itself in vSphere API models an event as what it is, not about how you look at it. This is a right design philosophy, but turns out to be a little tricky for you to figure out the type of an event.

How does vSphere Client do the trick?  Read more... (434 words, 1 image, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

As more and more clouds go live, it’s time to think about how they will need to interconnect and interact. InterCloud is a new terminology coined for cloud computing after Internet for networking.

Vint Cerf, the “father” of the Internet, said recently that the cloud is much like networking in 1973 when computer networks couldn’t connect or interact. He called for open standards for cloud computing so that InterCloud can become a reality.

It’s hard to design standards when people are still trying to reach a consensus on defining what a cloud is in the first place! The good news is that as an industry we went through a similar process for the Internet. So we can learn from that experience.

The idea is simple: look at basic building blocks we have for the Internet and think about their equivalent for the InterCloud. Believe it or not, InterCloud and Internet share many common characteristics. The following table summarizes some of these.  Read more... (314 words, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)

As a feature, lockdown mode has been added to vSphere 4.0 . Enabling it disables all remote root access to an ESXi machine. Any local changes to the host must be using:

• DCUI (Direct Console User Interface).
• vSphere Client or vCLI connecting to vCenter.
• vSphere Client or vCLI connecting to ESXi with a local user account on the host.

My colleague Duncan Epping has summarized a table showing whether you can change ESXi with different access methods in two modes.

As a general practice for better security, it’s recommended to enable lockdown mode. However the lockdown mode could be breached by adding root user to local groups,  Read more... (242 words, estimated 58 secs reading time)