VMware TechExchange will take place in San Francisco in the same location of VMworld 2010 from August 30 to September 1st. If you want to learn VMware technologies especially APIs/SDKs including Spring framework, Zimbra, and etc., you should join us. I will present best practices on using VMware vSphere APIs. Hopefully we will GA the vSphere(VI) Java API 2.1 by then.
To convince your boss, please read the blog Pablo just wrote:
- vSphere 4.1 APIs has some significant improvements, specifically around the Property Collector and AD authentication. We will have sessions to update you on what has changed, provide best practices when using them and hear from our engineers who have hands on experience working with our APIs. See our latest sessions added 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.
In vSphere 4.1, several properties and types have been deprecated. The following table from vSphere Web Services SDK 4.1 release note lists each deprecated API element and its replacement.
| Name of deprecated type, method, or property |
As of vSphere API 4.1, use instead… |
| Methods |
PropertyCollector.CheckForUpdates |
PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx |
PropertyCollector.RetrieveProperties |
PropertyCollector.RetrievePropertiesEx |
PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdates |
PropertyCollector.WaitForUpdatesEx |
VirtualMachine.AcquireMksTicket |
VirtualMachine.AcquireTicket |
| Data Objects |
VirtualMachineMksTicket |
VirtualMachineTicket |
| Data Object Properties |
ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.enabled |
ClusterVmToolsMonitoringSettings.vmMonitoring |
HostCapability.replayUnsupportedReason |
HostCapability.replayCompatibilityIssues |
VirtualDisk.shares |
StorageIOAllocationInfo.shares |
VirtualMachineRuntimeInfo.memoryOverhead |
PerformanceManager memory overhead counter |
Note that the release note has much more information that you should really read through if you use vSphere 4.1 API.
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.
The following tables list all the managed object types in VI 3.5, vSphere 4 and 4.1. A short description is provided for each type explaining its major responsibilities.
Note that the managed object types are added in an incremental way. The types in older versions are still supported in newer versions. The complete types in a verion include ones in the correpsonding table plus all the ones in all older version tables.
Hope this post gives you a high level overview of functionalities of the vSphere APIs. Check out other blogs such as best practices (1-5, 6-10) on how to use them in general. And don’t forget my book which introduces them extensively with many read to use samples.
Table 1 Managed Object Types in VI 3.5 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.
If you have a new hire, do you want him/her to push code into production system on the very first day? You may be OK with this sometimes. What if it’s a trading system with real money involved? More often than not, you come up with a different answer.
On Wednesday night, I attended a seminar organized by SDForum SAM SIG at LinkedIn headquarter. Pascal-Louis Perez and David Fortunato from Kaching.com engineering team gave a great talk on how they streamlined their software development process to the extent that they normally release 20 times a day to their production system. It’s quite a safe process that it’s OK for a new hire to push code on day one. 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.
After creating a light virtual appliance last year, Timo Sugliani continued with a full fledged version of virtual appliance with all you need for vSphere development with Java and Jython. This is what Timo called “my linux powershell toolkit.” The biggest advantage is that you are no longer limited by Windows as your development platform.
The virtual appliance is built on top of the latest Ubuntu 10.04. It has Eclipse 3.5 installed with PyDev plug-in preconfigured with Jython and latest VI(vSphere) Java API. It also has Komodo Edit 5.2 installed. So you have choice to use either of these two.
The appliance also ships with two samples:
- Simple sample : Connect to a vCenter Server and list Virtual Machines (first & second screenshot)
- More complex sample : Connect to a vCenter Server, and with the input data (Virtual Machine id list), will return a JSON list of dicts containing the vm id and the screenshot url for that vm id. (third screenshot)
With all the things packed together, the virtual appliance is about 2.5G in size. I think it really worths the time to download it based on my personal experience playing with it. Actually I tested it before Timo released it. If you want to get started with automating and managing vSphere with least effort, this appliance is for YOU!
Ready to download it? Click out Timo’s blog site . It also lists 3 screenshots showing you what it looks like.
Note: if you would like to use your existing OS with Eclipse or other IDEs, you can download the vSphere Java API from its project home.
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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