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.
Most of us are familiar with MOB, the Web based managed object browser.I’ve discussed the little known secret of it, and built a tiny yet powerful API on top of it.
There is yet another useful tool in vSphere you can leverage: Web based datastore browser. This tool allows you to use a standard Web browser to browse the datastores. You can access it using the following URL:
https://<hostname_or_IP>/folder
After logging in using your username and password, you see a list of datacenters. Clicking on one of them yields the list of datastores in the datacenter. After clicking on any datastore, you can browse the virtual machine folders in the datastores. Further navigation shows the list of files in the folder.
The datastore browser supports the following URL pattern:
http(s)://<hostname>/folder[/<path>]?dcPath=<datacenter_path>[&dsName=<datastore_name>]
You can download and upload files using the URLs. Some VI SDK APIs, such as FileManager, use the URLs as parameters. These URLs are not easy to type in correctly, but this datastore browser helps avoid those typos.
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.
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.
In his blog, Aaron showed a HelloVM.groovy program after my HelloVM.java from the VMware VI Java API project. Upon reading his code, you can have a good sense what the Groovy version looks like. He also gave a nice and short introduction about Groovy, along with links to online tutorials. So don’t worry if you are new to Groovy. In the end, he listed 7 steps on using VI Java API in Groovy for fun! In one of follow up comments, Guillaume Laforge contributed a slightly “goovy-fied” version. Great jobs Aaron and Guillaume! If you want to leverage VI Java API in Groovy, the article is a must read.
The VI Java API can be used in any JVM languages. If you are interested in writing a tutorial for other languages, please let me know (sjin2008 at users.sourceforge.net) and I will be happy to include your tutorial in the VI Java API website.
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 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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
Having answered many questions about IP addresses of virtual machines at different occasions, I still see more are coming. I think it’s time to write a blog about it. Hopefully people would search the Internet before raising the question.
First of all, there is a big confusion on the relationship of IP addresses and virtual machines. Many people tend to associate IP addresses with virtual machines, and want to retrieve/change the IP address of a virtual machine.
In fact, a virtual machine is very much like its physical counterpart. It does not have an IP address by itself. In other words, an IP address is NOT an intrinsic attribute of a machine, either virtual or physical. It might have one or more only after an OS is installed. In most cases, it does have one or more IP addresses, which gives the impression that every machine has an IP address.
A virtual machine does have intrinsic attributes such as MAC addresses if NIC cards are configured. Unlike its physical counterpart, a virtual machine’s MAC address can be re-configured. Some software vendors rely on MAC addresses to lock down their licensed software on particular machines. This mechanism can be, therefore, compromised in virtual environments. 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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