Chargeback is an important feature for computing infrastructures. Even inside an enterprise where IT users are not charged with real money, it’s still nice to see the usage patterns and sometimes avoid wasting resources. As I mentioned in IBM RC2, applying chargeback reduced unnecessary usage overnight.
VMware vCenter Chargeback is a component for this purpose. It can run standalone with Web GUI, and surface to vSphere Client as a plug-in. Although its name includes vCenter, it can also work with vCloud Director (see Using vCenter Chargeback with VMware Cloud Director).
I just spent some time over the weekend reading the API documentation, including vCenter Chargeback API Programming Guide, API Reference. The version 1.5 of the API Read more...
VMware ESX and ESXi (a.k.a. vSphere Hypervisor) support the most guest operating systems among all the hypervisors. From the vSphere API, you can determine what operating system is installed on a virtual machine.
The related managed object is the VirtualMachine and there are multiple ways to Read more...
Many folks talk about developer enablement today because it’s a key success factor for a platform company. If you haven’t watched this video by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, you want to check it out. Also, my previous blog: CO2: The Formula For A Successful Developer Ecosystem.
To empower developers, we got to figure out who the developers are and what they want. It’s hard, if ever possible, to identify every developer in VMware community. But it’s normally easy to find out the types of the developers. In my observation, there are two types of developers (The title of this article is not that accurate, but Read more...
After working on this for weeks, I am pleased to announce the first release of VMware vSphere API and SDK Frequently Asked Questions. It includes 70+ questions and trustable answers in 6 different categories: General, Getting Started, Language Bindings, VI Java API, API Usage, Troubleshooting.
From now on, before posting any question to any forum please read this FAQ page. For the best readability, I decided not to allow comments on that page. But your feedbacks and suggestions are always important. Please feel free to use this post for comments and discussions. Based on your inputs, I will continue to enhance the FAQs.
The open source VI Java API has implemented typing which makes it much easier to use and possible to catch errors in compile time. To use these types, you have to get hold of these objects. Normally you don’t need to worry about this because you navigate the system from the top ServiceInstance and get the managed objects through VI Java API calls.
There are some rare cases in which you get the object id first, for example, a task id as asked in the VI Java API forum. A bit more common case is when you develop vSphere Client plug-ins. The URL string your web application gets has object id and type for a virtual machine or host, etc.
Although coming from different use cases, Read more...
Per community requests, two methods were added into VI Java API 2.1 (GAed last summer) for changing the default connection and read timeouts. Both methods are defined in WSClient.java.
The first method setConnectTimeout() sets a specified timeout in milliseconds. It intends to be used when opening a communications link to the resource referenced by the URLConnection inside the WSClient object. If the timeout expires before the connection can be established, a java.net.SocketTimeoutException is raised. A timeout of zero is interpreted as an infinite timeout.
The second method setReadTimeout() Read more...
It’s common for companies to proxy HTTP traffics to external Web site, but not so for internal sites. Therefore, you rarely need to set up proxy for using vSphere API calls with an internal vCenter server. The uncommon cases do come up sometimes. This post explains how to set it up for vSphere API. Note that this is not really for VI Java API only but applicable for all Java applications.
There are two options and you can pick either of them per your use case: Read more...
It gives me great pleasure to welcome Cisco to our open source community. Given the brand recognition of Cisco, I don’t need to explain much about the significance of its becoming part of our community.
At the end of 2009, a development team at Cisco contacted me, and then started to use the VI Java API for integration with VMware vSphere. Like many other partners, they succeeded. Here is a paragraph I received from Andrew Levin (product manager) and Louis Jia (development manager). Thanks Andrew and Louis! Read more...
One of my colleagues asked me about vShield API and pointed me to the vShield API Programming Guide. I have of course heard about the vShield many times, but haven’t tried it out, let alone its API. But that doesn’t mean I cannot read it on demand. In fact, such questions motivate me to learn more beyond vSphere API. So keep your questions coming if you have one.
Here is what I found out after reading the programming guide. I have to admit I haven’t written any code connecting to a vShield test-bed, so I just share some basics of the API. Overall I found it’s similar to the vCloud API that I had worked with before in format and protocol.
Somehow the API does not, but I think should, Read more...
Last week an issue was reported with using vSphere SDK 4.1 to connect vSphere 4.0. The problem is related to the HTTP header called “SOAPAction” introduced in vSphere SDK 4.0. A recent KB article introduced this header, but with a minor error. I will talk about it in the end.
With vSphere SDK 4.1, the SOAPAction header has a value of “urn:vim25/4.1” while 4.0 has “urn:vim25/4.0”. For an older version of vSphere server, either vCenter or ESX/ESXi, it has no idea of the new value of SOAPAction, therefore refuse to serve. But the other way around works just fine because the newer version of vSphere knows about the older value but also support the older version of SDK directly. As a result, any application using older version of SDK works with newer version of vSphere. I am not saying your application can leverage new features. In fact, you cannot and must upgrade to do so.
From the SDK part, I found it’s a little disturbing when your newer SDK cannot work with older vSphere. We all expert newer SDK are better and back compatible. That is why Read more...
Two weeks ago when I twitted about VMware View APIs, several folks asked me if and where they could find View APIs. While VMware does not provide a full set of APIs, but does offer PowerShell based CLI as documented in the VMware View Integration Guide.
Beyond that, the guide also introduces the event database with tables and schemas so that you can retrieve various events from the database directly; how to import/export LDAP data to/from View; and how to “use Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor the state of VMware View components, including View Connection Server instances and security servers and View services running on these hosts.”
While trying the PowerShell CLI, Read more...
In my previous post, I introduced how to change a virtual machine’s vmx file programmatically and promised to post a full sample in my presentation at VMware Parter Exchange 2011. Now that the conference is over, it’s time to post it.
The sample is based on guideline VMX03 in vSphere security hardening guide: disable copy/paste to remote console. To me, allowing copy and paste to remote console like vSphere Client is a nice feature which can save you a lot of time. When security is a concern, however, you may want to disable it.
I will not discuss when you should disable/enable it because it really depends on your requirements. In most cases, security and convenience contradict with each other. I leave it for you to decide the right balance, but show you how you can check the setting and change it here.
Like most samples I write, Read more...
With a vSphere Client, you can easily check the memory information of a host, either ESX or ESXi. To get that, you click on a host from the inventory tree, and then configuration tab. From the left side Hardware section of the configuration page, you click Memory and see a pane displaying the memory info as follows:
Note that if you have chosen a ESXi host, you won’t see the Service Console part because there is no console OS any more in ESXi. BTW, VMware wants you to migrate from ESX to ESXi and here is a link with helps.
This seemingly easy information is actually not easy to get. At first glance, it should be in the config property of HostSystem (managed object representing an ESX or ESXi). The config property has a sub property called systemResources, typed as HostSystemResourceInfo. But you will get null for the systemResources property most, if not all, of the time, as reported in VI Java API forum.
Interestingly enough, HostSystem has a systemResources property in peer to the config property as well. Luckily, it’s not null so you can dig down for something. Still, with 3 sub properties of complex types included, how to get the memory from the data object?
Here are the steps to collect and calculate the numbers: Read more...
As most of you may have known, the vmx file is the most important file at the back of a virtual machine. It defines the configurations of a virtual machine for example virtual hardware version, devices, disk files, etc. That is why it owns the virtual machine icon when you look at all the files behind a virtual machine with either datastore browser in vSphere Client or VMware Workstation/Fusion.
Given the importance of the vmx file, we don’t recommend anyone to manually modify it given that messing it up may corrupt a virtual machine. You can change the content indirectly from GUI and APIs. If you can change the virtual devices of a virtual machine, its vmx file is changed accordingly.
Beyond basic configuration entries, the vmx file can be extended to hold key/value pairs. A vmx file is really a text file with many lines of key/value pairs. By extending it, you can add extra lines of key/value pairs at the end of the file. Keep in mind that you should NOT add any key that is duplicated with predefined keys like “virtualHW.version.” As you already noticed, the key has the “.” delimiter as namespace pattern. You can start with your own namespace to avoid possible name clash. Read more...
As we know Folder is a container object in vSphere. It’s used to hold other managed objects in a similar way as directory holding files in an OS. There is an interesting question asking in VI Java API forum on how to tell whether a folder is vmFolder or hostFolder. BTW, you don’t see these two folders displayed in vSphere Client.
The questioner guessed correctly that you can find out by a folder’s childType property. Here is the documentation in API reference on the possible values of the childType property: Read more...
I think there is a pretty good understanding on this topic, but questions still come up once in a while in VI Java API community and my inbox. Some people got errors while trying to manage free ESXi servers via API. The API support of free ESXi is limited to ready only according to a VMware KB article:
vCLI, PowerCLI, and vSphere SDk for Perl are limited to read-only access for the free vSphere Hypervisor edition. To enable full functionality of vCLI on a VMware ESXi host, the host must be licensed with vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus. Read more...
As I blogged before, you can use open source VI Java API in all JVM languages like Jython, Groovy, JRuby and frameworks like Grail. Today Dave Briccetti (@dcbriccetti) sent me a sample showing how to use it in Scala. Dave has been a happy user of the API since he started to work at VMware as an independent consultant more than a year ago.
Here is the code sample: Read more...
This question was asked at VI Java API forum recently and has been answered by the community.
There should be a “Destroy_Task()”-Method for each Managed Object, so also Virtual Machines…. Cheers, Joerg
As Jörg Lew has correctly pointed out the solution, I would like to elaborate a bit more here.
If you are using VI Java API, the method name is destroy_Task(). The code is as simple as: Read more...
If you have used vSphere API and read its API Reference, you may have noticed two most commonly used privileges: System.View and System.Read. They are required in many methods. As their names suggest they are different, but what is the difference? It can be confusing for some people including me initially because it’s nowhere documented.
Here are some explanations after my talking to my colleague Jianping Yang who is the vCenter DB and Security guru. Read more...
After NetApp, Brocade and many other companies showing up on the VI Java API poweredby page, we now have the world’s biggest technology company HP officially listed. HP started to use VI Java API about two years ago and has shipped products ever since. I have attended several meetings called by my colleague Lucas Nguyen to work with HP architect Zachary Speck and his team. Included in the following short paragraph is a link to the HP plugin product. Please feel free to check it out. Read more...
Recent Comments