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I got an interesting question on how to find out WSDL files are used by vSphere Web Services at the VI Java API forum. After some clarification, it turns out the questioner just wanted to know what methods are called, so that the proxy between client and vCenter server can decide whether it should be allowed to go through.

Although a rare use case, but it’s a valid and sophisticated one. In general, you can use vSphere built in feature for security, for example,  Read more... (239 words, estimated 57 secs reading time)

There was recently a question in VMware vSphere Web Service SDK forum regarding gzip compression in vSphere API. I understand where the user came from – some of the SOAP responses could be pretty big. If they can be compressed, performance could be improved and network bandwidth reduced.

The case can be a little tricky. On one hand, compressing big data definitely saves bandwidth; on the other hand,  Read more... (353 words, estimated 1:25 mins reading time)

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts, and strictly mine.

I missed the big launch of vSphere 5 on July 12 because I was having my vacation. When I came back, I found so many discussions around the vSphere 5 licensing change. It’s understandable that people don’t like changes, especially if the changes may have financial impacts.

Technically, the vRAM pooling simplifies the licensing model, as pointed out by Carter Shanklin. Money wise,  Read more... (405 words, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)

After blogging about moving virtual machines from a standard virtual switch to a distributed virtual switch, I saw a new question in VI Java API forum on how to roll it back. Technically, I don’t see any reason why one should switch back because using distributed virtual switch gives you a lot of benefits. But the decision is not mine but yours. Whatever you want to do, we help do it easily.

The method involved is  Read more... (198 words, estimated 48 secs reading time)

If you have paid close attention to the SOAP messages recorded by Oynx, you may have noticed that there is an extra attribute called “serverGuid” in a ManagedObjectReference. The following is copied from my previous posting “Moving Virtual Machine to Distributed Virtual Switch”.

<_this xsi:type=”ManagedObjectReference” type=”VirtualMachine” serverGuid=”BA9CE658-75F7-4A99-ACE6-99EB1376B94A”>vm-134</_this>

Note that this SOAP request message is from a vSphere Client. In VIJava API or other language binding, there is no such an attribute. You may wonder,  Read more... (384 words, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)

One of the most common confusions that a newcomer has while learning vSphere API is the ManagedObjectReference, a.k.a MOR. If you read the API Reference, you will find a lot of them. Recently there was a question poping in the open source VIJava API forum. So I think it is worth explaining it here.

There are two major types in the vSphere API: managed object types are for these objects on the server side only; and data object types for properties, parameters, and results, which can be send back and forth between client and server. The MOR is a data object type, but used to represent managed objects living on server side. If you are familiar with C/C++ programming, you can think of it as pointer in some sense. Even better,  Read more... (621 words, estimated 2:29 mins reading time)

Yesterday I blogged about the least used API in VMware vSphere. This naturally leads to another question, “what is the most used API in vSphere?” It’s a harder question than the “least” one, because for the latter I can be very sure that zero is the lowest possible usage. If that API is not the least, it must be one of the least.

Before we try to figure out the answer, let’s clarify a bit the “most used.” Does it mean the one that is called the most times? Does it mean the one that is touched and used by most developers?  Read more... (464 words, estimated 1:51 mins reading time)

Last week I was extremely busy working on the VI(vSphere) Java API 3.0 (codename: Crescendo) whose main theme to support the next release of vSphere. To my surprise, I caught on an API that should have been included in vSphere Java API 2.1 but somehow omitted. Even surprised to me is that no one has reported to me via our sourceforge.net tracker.

I think the conclusion can only be one –  Read more... (216 words, estimated 52 secs reading time)

The distributed virtual switch introduced in vSphere 4 has many benefits over the traditional switch. For one thing, you no longer have possible glitches with live migrating virtual machines from one host to another using traditional switches, and all your port settings go with your virtual machines.

If you have virtual machines using traditional switches, you can easily move them to new distributed virtual switches. The rest of this article explains how to achieve this.

You can use the  Read more... (285 words, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

After my last post Tagging: An invisible feature in vSphere, William Lam quickly followed up with another post in his blog, arguing vSphere Tagging Feature Not So Invisible. He made his case by showing how you can actually add and remove tags using addTag() and removeTag() method via vSphere MOB. You can definitely play with your test environment, but please do not mess up with any existing tags in your production environment.

Although you can do that via MOB, it’s not the officially supported way (BTW, this should not be taken as show stopper. After all,  Read more... (377 words, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)