October 6, 2010, is a historical moment for VI Java API project – the total downloads exceeded 10,000. It’s two days earlier than I had expected. After yesterday’s blog on the NetApp and Brocade’s testimonials, the daily downloads suddenly doubled. When I found the stats approaching 10,000, I tweeted “vSphere Java API 9,999 downloads now. Who want to be No. 10,000?” I wish I could have been able to track who made the No. 10,000. 
Strictly speaking, the total had exceeded 10,000 a while back. Besides typical downloads, you can also directly sync up with the subversion. As I checked the number there, it had passed 1,000 reads early this year.
Thanks to you all, the vSphere Java API community!
10,000 downloads is not a big deal for an application especially when it’s for end users. It’s a big deal for an API, and even bigger for an enterprise API which requires vSphere environment which not every developer has access to.
Besides the download number, I would like to brag these numbers: Read more... (261 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)
I am very pleased to welcome NetApp and Brocade to the vSphere(VI) Java API poweredby page. Many thanks to Patric Chang and Katie Colbert from Brocade, and George Costea and Eric Forgette from NetApp for making this happen.
NetApp and Brocade have been using open source vSphere(VI) Java API for quite some time and each has several products shipped with this open source API. As you may recall from my previous blog on VMworld 2010, I did not talk about NetApp and Brocade because I hadn’t got written permission even though they had great shows out there. Please feel free to check them out at VMworld in Copenhagen next week.
I think the key takeaway from this is that vSphere Java API has been stable enough to be used by companies like NetApp and Brocade that demand highest quality of products. For one thing, you can prabably afford not connecting to networks for a little while, but for sure cannot afford messing up your data storage. NetApp and Brocade’s confidence in this API is the best testimonial on the quality and readiness of the API. There are many other even bigger companies are using the API as well. I will talk more about them later. Read more... (414 words, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)
We just had the longest discussion in vSphere Java API forum regarding the “UUID of an NFS datastore.” The question is basically how to find the “UUID” via the vSphere API.
You can create datastores based on either VMFS or NFS. The VMFS can be backed up by local SCSI, or SAN (FC, iSCSI). It’s very easy to find UUID of a VMFS based datastore by calling getUuid() method from the corresponding data object VmfsDatstoreInfo.
For NFS based datastore, it’s a lot complicated. I am glad we digged to the bottom of the issue. Instead of going through the long discussion, I summarize the key takeways from the discussion.
Before jumping into details, let’s clarify one thing: NFS datastore does not have a UUID. (If you want to know more about UUID in vSphere, you should read this blog article.) You can check out the NasDatastoreInfo which does not have uuid property. It does, however, have an identifier like 73ca9790-6dbf88b0, which is not a UUID per se. We will call it simply an ID.
Motivation
You may be wondering why you should care about the ID. It is pretty important in that it’s used in performance stats like the following: Read more... (434 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)
Last week I answered a question in VMware Web Services SDK forum about asterisks in vSphere API reference. Underneath these asterisks comes a note saying “May not be present.” What does it really mean?
The asterisks normally show up after properties or sub-properties defined with a managed object. As it says, it’s possible that there is NO value to the property.
How can it be like this?
There are two major causes. First, it reflects the different implementations of ESX, ESXi and vCenter. As a quick example, you can find many of the properties in the “content” (type: ServiceContent) come with asterisks.
On a vCenter server, you will find values to almost all the properties, but not quite so for ESX/ESXi. But we have one API reference document, so it’s natural to mark whatever possible no value as “may not present.”
Secondly, it may be as such depending on the state of a managed object. For instance, a virtual machine can be a bare machine without an OS installed. Therefore, the “guest” property of the virtual machine could have no value at all.
What does it mean to you? Read more... (357 words, estimated 1:26 mins reading time)
Last week I discussed how to get event type with vSphere API, followed by a comment asking why there is no DatacenterRemovedEvent? Very good question and almost got me there.
vSphere API has a comprehensive object model for event. In version 4.1, we have 474 different types of events representing different things happened in vSphere. When a managed entity is removed, there are normally events associated, for example, VmDeployedEvent, HostRemovedEvent, ClusterDestroyedEvent, ResourcePoolDestroyedEvent, DatastoreDestroyedEvent, DatastoreRemovedOnHostEvent, etc. It’s natural to expect DatacenterRemovedEvent. But you don’t find one.
It’s not only Datacenter which does have DatacenterCreatedEvent and DatacenterRenamedEvent. For Folder type, you find nothing other than VmBeingClonedNoFolderEvent which is not related to lifecycle of Folder at all.
Why are these events missing? Read more... (440 words, 1 image, estimated 1:46 mins reading time)
vSphere has a powerful extension mechanism that allows you to add new features as integral part of the platform. Many vendors have already leveraged this by providing plug-ins so that users can manage their components seamlessly within same vSphere Client.
You can actually do more than that with the extension. The following sample shows how to create your own task and event with vSphere API. The code should be self explanatory therefore I don’t elaborate much here. Note that you must run the sample with a vCenter server as extensibility is implemented only in vCenter.
When running the code, you can see a new task created and progresses with 10% every second in the “Recent Tasks” pane of vSphere Client. When the task is done, you will also see a new event posted in the “Tasks & Events” tab of the host you associate the task with.
What can you do with this capability? Here are two typical use cases: Read more... (788 words, estimated 3:09 mins reading time)
Since vSphere 2.5, there is a feature allowing you to capture screen shot of a running virtual machine. It’s not well publicized but you can find a short description with screenshotSupported (boolean) in the HostCapability data object. Thanks to Nikita for bringing this up in the comment of the vSphere Java API 2.1 GA post.
Indicates whether the screenshot retrival over https is supported for this host’s virtual machines. If true, a screenshot can be retrieved at the HTTPS relative path /screen?id=<managed object ID of virtual machine or snapshot>. If any of the optional parameters ‘top’, ‘left’, ‘bottom’, and ‘right’ is specified, the returned image will be cropped from the rectangle with upper left corner (left, top) and bottom right corner (right – 1, bottom – 1). These values default to the top, left, bottom and right edges of the image. The client must use an authenticated session with privilege VirtualMachine.Interact.ConsoleInteract on the requested virtual machine or, in the case of a snapshot, the virtual machine associated with that snapshot.
The managed object ID of virtual machine is the value of ManagedObjectReference, which can be easily found using MOB.
Once you have it, you can issue a URL as follows in any browser and get the screen shot in PNG format. Read more... (430 words, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)
VMware vSphere API is defined by WSDL. As discussed in my previous blog REST or SOAP, Web Services is by nature procedural, and it does not support OO (object oriented). This contributes to the learning curve of vSphere Web Service API which is modeled with OO.
What if you want to find out what properties are supported by a particular managed object type in vSphere API? There was a specific question recently in blog comment: how to get valid/supported property paths like summary.hardware.numNics with HostSystem type.
Currently there is no systematically way to get this metadata which is not defined in WSDL. You have to manually read through vSphere API Reference.
Since vSphere Java API 1.0 (a.k.a. VI Java API by then), I have manually added a getter method for every property in the Java API. So the metadata is built in vSphere Java API from the beginning. Whenever there is a manual process, it could be error-prone. As much carefully as I liked, I made mistakes with properties ignored in vSphere Java API occasionally. These mistakes have been immediately patched up upon bug reports or self reviewing.
To get exactly what you want programmatically, you have to do something extra with Java reflection API. Let’s pick HostSystem as an example here. Read more... (414 words, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)
Last week was a super busy week for all the people involved in VMworld 2010 in San Francisco. Because I spent two hours driving to Moscone Center and back home, I didn’t write any blog after getting back totally exhausted. Now it’s time to get back to it.
I believe there are many blogs/news on VMworld in general. Let me get down to a much narrow part: VMware Sponsored open source vSphere Java API at VMworld 2010.
Thanks to the community, my presentation on vSphere API Best Practice went very well. It’s based on the top 10 best practices blog (part 1, part 2) I wrote early this year, with real world experiences shared with partner engagements. Two copies of my book were given away at the end of the presentation. Thanks to Pablo Roesch for getting the books!
After the presentation, I was invited to check out new products built on top of vSphere Java API. I cannot disclose all of them here because some are not yet on the poweredby page. Here are several companies I can publicly talk about: Read more... (545 words, estimated 2:11 mins reading time)
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)
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