Following the vSphere 4.1 release, I am pleased to announce the release of the vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 beta that fully supports the vSphere 4.1. The 2.1 beta has been ready for limited access for months by VMware internal teams, and partners/customers who participated vSphere 4.1 beta program.
The 2.1 beta works with VMware Infrastructure 3.0, 3.5, vSphere 4, and 4.1. It automatically detects the versions of 4 and 4.1, so you don’t need to change the way you work with the API. Besides the support of 4.1, it also includes several bug fixes since 2.0 update 1 released last December. For more info on what’s new in vSphere API 4.1, check out this blog.
I plan to GA version 2.1 in about one month. Please help to give the beta a try. I need your help to report bugs for best quality of the API. You can download the API here, and file bugs here.
BTW, many thanks to those who have submitted the survey VMware does for this open source API. If you haven’t submitted yours yet, please do so quickly because the survey is closing soon. Your feedbacks are critical for the API to be supported.
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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
VMware announced GA of vSphere 4.1 product this Tuesday. Here is the official what’s new in vSphere 4.1. Many bloggers already covered different aspects of the product itself: VMware vSphere 4.1: Advancing the Platform for Cloud Computing, Useful vSphere 4.1 knowledgebase articles, vSphere 4.1 released, Release: VMware vSphere 4.1, etc. I don’t repeat these here, but focus on the new APIs in 4.1 release.
In general, the APIs are the programatic “view” of features. Understanding the features helps a lot on understanding the APIs. So I strongly encourage you to read new features of the product itself. Note that not all the new features especially the performance and scalability features are explicitly reflected in API signatures.
vSphere API 4.1 introduces 7 new managed object types:
vSphere 4.1 adds 23 new methods to 10 existing managed object types: 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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
VMware launches an official survey on the open source vSphere(VI) Java API. Please let the company know your take on the open source project, and what you want, for example, formal developer support, etc.
The survey includes 16 simple questions and should take no more than 3 minutes to finish. All the collected information is confidential.
Note that the survey result decides what to come next. Please make sure your voice heard by taking the survey here.
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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
I have finished vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 beta last week. The major feature is to support next version of vSphere. The company legal also approved the contribution to the open source project after product release.
Because VMware hasn’t released the next version of product yet, I cannot release the code to general public for the moment. API and product are much like the view and model in MVC: from the new APIs you can guess what new features are in the coming product.
For existing vSphere beta partners/customers, if you want to have early access to the vSphere Java API 2.1 beta code, please contact me with your name, company, and technical alliance manager (TAM) at VMware. My email address is sjin at vmware.com. If you are not a beta user, the support is not very useful anyway.
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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
I got a request a while back for extending the vSphere Java API. The idea is that the API itself is pretty basic and not high level enough for some applications. For example, if you want to add a virtual NIC to a virtual machine, there is no explicit method for doing this. Fair enough.
Now, how to achieve this?
Three possible approaches
- Change the structure of the API. For every managed object type, we have two types: one with implementation, and the other inheriting the first one but really empty. The user can replace the first second one with extra methods as extensions. This approach is smart, but will cause confusion in the future. For instance, we will have many different implementations for the sample types.
- Use composition. You can create a new type that contains an instance of a managed object. How to expose the methods of the managed object? You can either manually add them to the containing type, or expose the instance of the managed object so that others can call its methods.
- Use inheritance. You can create a new type that inherits a managed object type. Once you get an instance of a normal managed object, you can pass into the constructor of extended managed object type. You can use the extended type anywhere a normal type is expected. Let’s pick VirtualMachine as an example, 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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
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