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If you have viewed the video about Onyx by Carter Shanklin (@cshanklin), you may have noticed a little trick with the vSphere Client.

Normally on the login dialog box, you enter a hostname or IP address. By default, the vSphere Client use HTTPS to communicate with the server. That means you cannot easily see what’s passed back and forth on the wire. As shown in the Onyx video, Carter showed how to use HTTP instead of the default HTTPS with the following in the IP Address / Name field:

http://localhost:1545

So the vSphere Client does support HTTP. In Onyx case, it points to localhost on which the Onyx is installed. You can actually point to a real vCenter or ESX/ESXi server directly – just change the localhost to the IP address of the server and the port to the default port 80 or remove the port part.

Before connecting the server, you need to change the server a bit for it to support HTTP.  Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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In my previous blogs, I talked about session management for scalability and best practices (#9). In this one, I am going to drill down to the bottom.

To your surprises, there are two types of sessions involved in vSphere SDK:

• HTTP Session. It’s used to identify a client and tracked by the cookie in HTTP header. Once you login the server, all the successive requests have to carry the cookie header similar as follows

vmware_soap_session=”5229c547-1342-47d1-e830-223d99a47fba”

• User Session. It’s used to identify a login session of a particular user. You can use SessionManager to find out more the details of the current user and other login users from the UserSession data object. The key in the UserSession is in the same format as the HTTP session, but you should never confuse them, or use them interchangeably. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.