Folks,

I am very happy to have Alket Memushaj come by and tell us how VMware Professional Services can help customers /partners with their SDK Integrations. Below is a quick interview that touches on how VMware PS can help.

Pablo: Alket thank you for taking the time to meet with us today, I know you guys are swamped helping our customers with thier integration, and customization projects. I think it would be great if we can start off by telling us about your professional background, and how long you have been working at VMware ?



Alket: Hi Pablo, thank you for giving me the chance to talk about our team and what we can do for our customers. I've been working at VMware Professional Services since the middle of 2007; I joined as a Sr. Consultant in the NY Metro team and prior to that I worked for a number of SI-s in the area, one of them amongst the first VAC-s in the Northeast. My educational background is in CE/CS. I first started playing with the SDK in 2007, as somewhat of a personal project. Soon word got out and we started working with customers who were deploying large scale VMware Infrastructure and needed to automate deployment and management of their environment.

Some other fun projects I was involved in were when we developed the code (C#) and manuals for the SDK Lab for VMWorld 2007 in San Francisco which was one of the smaller but popular labs. For VMWorld 2008 our team decided to utilize the Powershell and Perl toolkits to not only show the concepts, but also create code for real world use cases that customers could put to use immediately. Folks should know that the VMworld 2008 lab has now been posted for all to use visit the DC blog. http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/DeveloperCenter/2009/01/14/an-introduction-to-scripting-vi-using-perl-or-powershell

Pablo: What other types of interesting projects are you seeing customers use the SDK to integrate with ?

Alket: In general it's management and automation projects, as customers deploy larger and larger VI farms, it becomes necessary to utilize our SDK. Some customers have found it necessary to utilize the SDK in order to build systems that reflect their internal processes and integrate with their existing systems, from deployment websites to home-grown VDI management applications. We are ready to help customers with the SDK, by providing training and/or consultative assistance.

Pablo: What advice would you give an IT manager that is considering engaging with VMware PSO on an integration project ?

Alket: They need to work with our Solution Architect in thier area to scope out the engagement. Our SA-s are familiar with these type of engagements and are able to turnaround things quickly.

Pablo: For our developers out there is there a piece of advice, favorite code sample, API usage you would like to share with our community ?

Alket: Well, I would suggest that when retrieving objects or lists of objects, use the API which gives you the ability to specify the required subproperty. It is commonly overlooked, I've seen many cases where customers obtain every property of, say, every VM. It is a rather expensive operation. I would also suggest understanding the object hierarchy in the API, it is extremely useful even for folks who use the Powershell and Perl toolkits.

Pablo: Where should we point folks if they would like to contact a VMware PSO SDK integration specialist ?

Alket: Please complete our webform to start the process http://www.vmware.com/go/sdkpso

Pablo: I understand our customers might have PSO credits, Can these PSO credits be applied towards an SDK integration engagement ?

Alket: Yes, PSO credits can be used towards any type of engagement with PSO, including SDK training or integration engagements.