While playing vSphere API last week, I got into an issue that I cannot disable the SSH server with Firewall APIs (see HostFirewallSystem). The following call would throw an exception:
hfs.disableRuleset(“sshServer”);
There are many other different services like “sshClient” whose ports can be enabled and disabled via the API. As a nice surprise, they all work just fine.
During the past weekend, I upgraded the vijava API project to the new Allura platform provided by Sourceforge.net. That’s really a button click and then waited for incoming emails for status updates. It went smoothly and didn’t take long before it finished.
Note that the upgrade is limited to the project hosting, not the Web site (http://vijava.sf.net) which remains the same and continues to work as before.
It’s been two months since I announced beta of VI Java API 5.1 supporting vSphere 5.1 on September 23. I got many emails asking for the GA date from ISVs and IHVs as the API is now a corner stone in their products. With the long (could be longer, BTW) Thanksgiving holidays, I got some time to review the fixes and release the GA version. I intended to announce it yesterday but somehow extra spam comments pushed the database behind over 100MB limit thus I could not post any new article.
One of the key new features in vSphere 5.1 is the Single Sign On. Because it’s new and also complicated, I’ve heard it’s not easy to get it right the first time. Experts recommend that you should play with it in a test or staging environment before upgrading your production environment.
I know it’s well past the GA date of the product on September 10, but I still decide to write this what’s new for the completeness of vSphere SDK FAQs.
As I always emphasize, the SDK/APIs are “view” to the product (you can think it as “model” here). Therefore to understand a SDK/APIs, it’s important to check out the product first. No exception for the new features: what’s new in vSphere decides what’s new in vSphere SDK/APIs. For that, you want to check out the What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 at VMware website.
While trying latest Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express, I also played with the C# samples of the VMware vSphere SDK. Unfortunately, there isn’t direct support for VS 2012 but for VS 2010, 2008, and 2005. However, you can easily create project files for the VS 2012 by yourself assuming you are already familiar with the Visual Studio environment.
After VMware released the vSphere 5.1 on the night of September 10, I finally got a chance to look at the new vSphere API, including the API reference and more important to me the WSDL files.
I was relieved to find out that there weren’t many changes. No single managed object is added to the vSphere 5.1 API, meaning a lot less work than I thought for vijava API to support the latest vSphere 5.1.
Recently I got several questions and even a bug on supporting the next release of vSphere in the open source VI Java API. The questions are mostly from VMware partners who have early access of the private beta of next release of vSphere and want to ship their own products at the same time of vSphere GA. I figure more partners may have the same question, therefore decide to answer it all here with a possible work around.
While preparing this annoucement, I realize that on the same day last year we had a very successful community event with several techtalks to celebrate the 3 year of vijava open source project. Today it’s the 4th year of this project!
Since VI Java API 5.0 GAed last October, there have been some changes, one of which is that I left VMware and joined VCE the same month. On the project side, there are several new bugs opened with the forum. These bugs do not affect most developers. But still I fixed them quickly in the code repository so that anyone who was affected could get the fixes from there.
While working at VMware, I always wondered what Cisco Nexus 1000V looked like from VMware vSphere API. Because I didn’t have access to such a system, I had no way to investigate further. This remained a myth to me until I joined VCE where I found many Vblock systems with Cisco Nexus 1000V as part of standard configuration.
Within VMware vSphere API, there are two managed object types defined related to distributed virtual switch: DistributedVirtualSwitch, and VmwareDistributedVirtualSwitch. As you can guess, the latter type is a subtype of the first one.
This is a wrap-up post of recent series on vSphere guest operating system management APIs. If you missed them, here are a few links to related posts: [Note: these are not related to the vSphere Guest API.]
My last post explained how to download file from a guest operating system. Naturally this post is about how to upload file. After a quick sample code, I will discuss how to extend the capability of existing APIs that run program inside guest operating system. My next post will wrap up this series of guest related APIs in vSphere API.
Let’s take a look at a sample code: (To run it, first check out the simple prerequisites in a previous post)
In my last few posts I discussed how to use the Guest Operating System Management API to run program, set/read environment variables. From this post, I will talk about how to move files to and from a Guest Operating System, and advanced features like moving whole directory only implemented in the Guest Operating System Management API.
While reading my last post on reading environment variables from a guest operating system, you may wonder how to set environment variables. Don’t be disappointed if I tell you that there is NO direct support for setting an environment variable.
However, you have a workaround - use a command directly. Unlike reading variables, there is no standard ways to do it for different operating systems. You have to first figure out what type of operating system and then run different commands. For example, if you are targeting Windows family of operating systems, you simply run the following:
My last post explained how to run, kill, and list programs in guest operating system on VMware. In that post, I mentioned that you can actually use the same API, GuestProgramDirector in particular, to read environment variables. I think the explanation is detailed enough for an implementation.
Still, a good sample provides more details. That is why I decided to write a quick sample just to show how to read environment variables. While trying the sample by myself, I did find more that I will discuss after the sample code.
In my last article, I announced the Guest Operating System Management API for vSphere. As promised, I will write samples to show how to use the APIs. This post explains the GuestProgramDirector type with an example.
Let’s take a quick look at the following sample:
Having created a sample to run a program in guest operating system using GuestProgramManager, I started to write a similar one to show how to use the GuestFileManager. Compared with the GuestProgramManager, the GuestFileManager is much more complicated to use.
Integrating VIX API into vSphere API is a great decision VMware made for its vSphere 5.0 release. Instead of working on two separate APIs, you now have one to deal with. It also solves the portability issue of VIX APIs which is tied to a specific platform – VIX has three versions for Windows, 32-bit Linux, and 64-bit Linux.
As I tweeted last week, there would be a big announcement when the open source VI Java API gets 20,000 downloads. It hit target yesterday. To celebrate it, I decide to release the code generator for the API, which William (@lamw) rated as “awesome.”
If you’ve had a chance to use vSphere Web Service SDK, you must know the PropertyCollector is very hard to use. It takes a newcomer quite some time to learn how to use it, and even more time to learn to use it effectively. Luckily, you no longer have to if you use the open source vSphere Java API (a.k.a. vijava) because it has encapsulated the PropertyCollector behind these newly added getter methods of the managed object types.
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