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My former colleague Emad Benjamin at VMware has just published a new book on running Java on vSphere. When I was still there, I had the opportunity to review the Chapter 5 of his book.

As many of you know, Emad is a well-known expert on this subject who has spoken at various events like VMworld and helped numerous customers. You can buy his book at Amazon or from publisher directly. Remember to bring it to next year’s VMworld for his autograph.:-)  Read more... (435 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts, and strictly mine.

I missed the big launch of vSphere 5 on July 12 because I was having my vacation. When I came back, I found so many discussions around the vSphere 5 licensing change. It’s understandable that people don’t like changes, especially if the changes may have financial impacts.

Technically, the vRAM pooling simplifies the licensing model, as pointed out by Carter Shanklin. Money wise,  Read more... (405 words, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)

If you are familiar with social media or research papers, you must know tagging already – You use keywords to label an entity, be it a blog post, an article, or something else, so that it can be easily searched out. So it’s a very useful feature in managing information.

In vSphere 4.0, VMware added tagging capabilities to the managed entities. According to the API reference of 4.1, it’s still an experimental feature and  Read more... (413 words, 1 image, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)

After publishing the tech talk slides, I am happy to announce that the record is ready now. If you have missed the onsite or online session, or simply want to watch it again, please feel free to click here. Note that you will need Adobe Flash 10.1 or higher to view the recording.

Many thanks to my colleague Luke Kilpatrick (@lkilpatrick) for helping with online streaming and recording, and Matt Dhuyvetter for setting up the top quality audio feeds!

My colleague John Troyer (@jtroyer), who hosts VMware Communities Roundtable, has posted an interview with Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) and me about our thoughts on VMware SDKs, APIs, and CLIs on May 18. During the interview, I answered questions about the open source vSphere Java APIs, the themes of my blogs (why it’s called doubecloud), what I am doing now at VMware, and of course our first community meetup event on the same day. If you have missed the session, you can listen to it now: , or here.  Read more... (169 words, estimated 41 secs reading time)

It’s been a while since I checked the VI Java API fling at VMware Lab last time. When I checked it again yesterday, I found something new and exciting – VI Java API on Google Android. The following comment was posted there by a gentleman called Bob:

Great framework, I used it on a recently published android application (avmcontrol – vsphere client for android), I had to tweak it a bit, however developing for android using vijava was much easier then the same for iOS4 devices.

Following the link, I found  Read more... (295 words, estimated 1:11 mins reading time)

Days ago I introduced the new licensing APIs since vSphere 4 and a sample that prints license expiration dates. Here is yet another sample that replaces an old license with a new license.

You may be wondering why anyone would do this. This is in fact not a typical use case. You probably know that vSphere Client does not treat license keys like passwords which are not visually displayed as dots or asterisks. As a result, anyone who can access a vSphere Client can write down license keys and use them elsewhere.

Normally this is not an issue at all. What about  Read more... (423 words, estimated 1:42 mins reading time)

A new feature called vCenter Linked Mode has been introduced in vSphere 4. It allows several vCenter servers to form a linked mode group. When you connect to any of the vCenter server via vSphere Client, you see all of them behind a single pane of glass.

I got questions from time to time, “what does it mean for vSphere API?” More specifically, if you connect to one vCenter in a linked mode group, will you “see” all of them? If not, how can vSphere Client achieve that?  Read more... (383 words, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)

In my previous blog, I introduced the new licensing APIs since vSphere 4. As promised, I will write samples showing how to use the APIs.

Here is the first sample (stay tuned to next one, coming soon). What it does is to check the licenses in vCenter server for their expiration dates, and print them out in the console. You can of course save them into other format, say an CSV file so that you can use Excel to further analyze it. To run the sample, you must change the IP address to the vCenter server, the username/password, as would with most VI Java API samples.

Note that a license could be an  Read more... (290 words, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)

There has been a total change in vSphere licensing model since version 4. Before that, you need a special/dedicated licensing server which may be more flexible/powerful but also cause many troubles in production environment which made licensing related issues one of the top categories in tech support.

vSphere 4 has dramatically simplified the whole licensing model, and removed the licensing server. To find out how the new licensing model works, check out the VMware vSphere 4 Licensing Guide. It covers both the vSphere side and the portal with which you can easily manage your license keys: splitting/combining, etc. This article does not cover the portal part but related APIs only.

Management APIs reflect product features. If you check the latest API reference, you will find out  Read more... (1111 words, 1 image, estimated 4:27 mins reading time)