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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 Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.