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... (1338 words, estimated 5:21 mins reading time)
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... (335 words, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)
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. Read more... (268 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)
Since the term “vCloud” was made public at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, VMware has been working hard to define and implement its vCloud vision and strategies.
In 2009, VMware announced vCloudExpress with service provider partners such as Terremark. VMware also submitted its vCloud API spec to DMTF so that the industry could benefit from the standardized management of APIs. VMware also acquired SpringSource in 2009. The acquisition attracted a lot of attention, scrutiny and questions.
Earlier this year VMware acquired Zimbra, the leading provider of SaaS collaboration software, and subsequently it also bought RabbitMQ. Both are now part of the VMware SpringSource portfolio. Last week, VMware and Saleforce.com announced vmforce.com which is a joint venture targeting enterprise PaaS cloud. Yesterday VMware announced acquisition of GemStone (pending).
With these acquisitions and announcements, the company’s strategy is clearer than ever. Looking back again, VMware has been building a cloud product and service portfolio under the vCloud umbrella. Some previously misunderstood acquisitions become well aligned in the vision and strategies of vCloud.
vCloud is not the only player in the industry but VMware is well on its way. Given its deep roots in enterprise data center virtualization, no one can ignore the potential of VMware in cloud computing.
To help enterprises better understand vCloud, I offer ten things you should know: Read more... (726 words, estimated 2:54 mins reading time)
In a previous article Top 10 Best Practices Using VMware VI and vSphere SDK, I mentioned synchronous versus asynchronous calls in the second best practice “Choose Right APIs.” But no detail was provided there. In this article, which is based on my book VMware VI and vSphere SDK , I discuss all the details.
Some methods defined on managed objects in vSphere API are asynchronous, meaning they return right away whether the operations are done successfully or not. That makes sense for long-running operations; you don’t want to block your current thread by waiting for the return of the call, and you might want to cancel it before it’s done.
For these asynchronous methods, the VI SDK provides a way to track the progress and results after the invocation is returned. As a naming convention, a long-running asynchronous method has _Task as a suffix in the method name, and it returns MOR to a Task. With MOR pointing to the Task object, you can track the progress and even get the result of the operation. For example, the cloneVM_Task() method defined in VirtualMachine is a long-running method that returns MOR pointing to a Task managed object. Read more... (484 words, estimated 1:56 mins reading time)
Every time I google for VI(vSphere) Java API, I get something new. Here is yet another one I just found. It’s a blog article Easy VMware Development with VI Java API and Groovy by Aaron Sweemer. By reading his blog site, I came to know Aaron is actually my colleague at VMware working as a Sr. System Engineer in Cincinnati Ohio. He is the principal blogger at Virtual Insanity. Read more... (211 words, estimated 51 secs reading time)
The winners of the VMware Script-O-Mania contest was announced today by Pablo Roesch at VMware Developer Blog. Congratulations to Alan, William and Arnim who won the first three awards!
I just took some time to read these scripts even though PowerShell and Perl are not for me. Here I give you a brief introduction of the scripts, what vSphere APIs they used directly or indirectly, and why they topped the contest. Because vSphere API is based on Web Services, you can port the scripts to other languages like Java, .Net, whatever you feel comfortable with. If you want to port any of them using vSphere Java API, I am more than happy to include your contribution.
Note that the following comments are strictly my own opinions.
1. Who Created that VM ? – by Alan Renouf using PowerCLI
A script to add information back into the vSphere client, this script which is designed to run once a day (or more) as a scheduled task, will add a custom attribute to each VM with the creator and date created of that VM. A script to add information back into the vSphere client, this script which is designed to run once a day (or more) as a scheduled task, will add a custom attribute to each VM with the creator and date created of that VM.
Steve’s Comments:
Nice integration with the vSphere Client, making you almost doubt why it wasn’t there in the first place. Additional one liner scripts provide nice answers to the questions like who created the most VMs, how many VMs were created each month. Read more... (671 words, estimated 2:41 mins reading time)
I posted my first blog at VMware vCloud blog site, the company’s official blog on cloud computing, last month. It’s about the high level comparison between vCloud API and Amazon EC2 API: what is common and what is different?
http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2010/02/a-quick-comparison-of-vmware-vcloud-and-amazon-ec2-apis.html
Yesterday I posted my second blog there about moving virtual machines back from the service providers’ cloud to the enterprise. It’s not as easy as we expect today. We need one click sending VMs to and from the public cloud. Read more... (81 words, estimated 19 secs reading time)
VMwareExpress truck came to VMware headquarter before noon today, parking between the gym and office buildings. I went to check it out this afternoon, also enjoyed ice cream in front of the truck.
The following is a picture of the truck. I could use others, but think this one is better because it has the cloud as background. 
Read more... (215 words, 1 image, estimated 52 secs reading time)
After my presentation yesterday, I had more time on the break-out sessions and self paced lab today.
Accelerate Your Services With VMware Services Automation Tools
This session is by Budianto Bong, VMware Sr. Product Manager. He demoed three tools from VMware PSO that help consulting partners: Migration Manager, Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator, and HealthAnalyzer. The first one is not the P2V converter, but a management tool that tracks, manages, and reports large scale migration projects.
Using the VMware vSphere PowerCLI for Automated Installation And Configuration of ESXi and vCenter for ISV Partners
This is a joint presentation by VMware TAM Ken Brady, and CareFusion network engineer Fisk Shogren. Ken introduced the basics of PowerCLI and VMware TAP programs. Fish showed off his PowerShell code that is used to set up the environment, which took 2 days, if lucky, of manual work before. It’s a great example on how much you can get by automating vSphere API, particularly with PowerCLI. I handed over my business card so that Fisk can show more of his code later.
Getting Stoned With “Project Onyx” Read more... (736 words, estimated 2:57 mins reading time)
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