Blog Posts

Folks,

We just created an Orchestrator API community and welcome all VMware vCenter Orchestrator API developers to participate and help us build a robust community. Please join us, participate and share.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/orchestrator

Regards,

Pablo

Welcome to our VMware Coffee Talk Live Webinars. The goal of our webinars is to communicate latest information about our SDKs and Toolkits to our developers and scripters integrating and automating with the vSphere platform. Our meetings will be held the first Wednesday of the month from 9:00 am – 10:00 am PST. We will also be recording these sessions for folks that cannot attend. Visit our calendar on vmwareapis@gmail.com for latest sessions and be sure to invite a friend.



About our live webinars We will be using Web Ex for our events this means that some of the folks out there might need to download the Web Ex client. Our recorded sessions and pdfs will be posted here as well. These webinars are a great opportunity for you to meet our Product Management and Engineering teams and ask your questions. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Topic	Day	Registration Information	Presentation, WebinarLinks
What is new with vSphere Web Services SDK Deep Dive with Balaji Parimi\ Part 1	Wed May 6th, 2009	Completed	vSphereSDK_NewFeatures-5-6-09.pdf Webinar recording Link\
What is new with vSphere Web Services SDK Best Practices with Balaji Parimi\ Part 2	Friday May 8th, 2009	Completed	vSphereSDK_BestPractices.pdf Webinar recording Link\
PowerCLI - What is new in PowerCLI by Carter Shanklin	Wed June 3rd, 2009	Completed	PDF, Slides, Sample Code Link\ Webinar recording link\
Special Event - VMware Studio 2.0 - Matthew Ford\	Wed June 24th, 2009	Completed	Studio-CoffeeTalk-final.pdf Webinar recording link\
VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit - VDDK 1.1 - Sudarsan Piduri\	Wed July 1st, 2009	Completed	vddk-coffee-talk.pdf Webinar recording\
To be announced	Wed August 5th, 2009

Folks,

We have put together a survey to help us understand what your needs are from a vSphere Management perspective. The survey is targeted at folks that manage and write management applications for vSphere, VI 3.x environments.

Please take our survey - click here

The goal of this survey is to better understand which applications (commercial or in-house developed) you use or develop to manage the VMware vSphere Platform. We need your feedback as it will help us understand which 3rd party vendors or tools VMware needs to focus on.

This survey should take approximately 22 minutes to complete.

We will be awarding great prizes to lucky winners.

Grand Prize - 1 Full Conference Pass to VMworld San Francisco 2009
First Prize is - 1 iPod Touch 8GB

Winners will be chosen in a random drawing

Please review the contest rules, terms, and conditions below.

Contest Information and Rules

o Survey Starts: June 17, 2009 11:59 PM PST
o Closes: Monday August 3rd, 2009 10:00 PM CST
o Winners will be announced on the Developer Center Blog: Friday August 7th 2009
o VMware employees are excluded from entering
o One entry per person
o Raffle participants must fully complete survey
o Winners will be chosen at random by VMware
o You must provide a valid corporate email address - no personal email addresses please
o This contest is for VMware customers, there is no purchase necessary to participate
o Terms and Conditions

Folks,

We are extremely happy to announce the availability of our VMware vSphere SDKs and Toolkits to support the relase of the vSphere platform.

Congratulations to the teams around the world working day and night to make this happen.

New SDKs & Toolkits released today

VMware vSphere Web Services SDK 4.0

VMware vSphere Guest SDK 4.0

VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit 1.1

VMware CIM SDK 4.0

VMware SDK for Perl 4.0

VMware vSphere Client Plug-ins

VMware vSphere CLI 4.0

VMware vSphere PowerCLI 4.0

VMware vSphere Management Assistant 4.0

VMware Open Virtual Format Tool 1.0

Changes to our site:

o Creation of dedicated community style product pages. Product pages have links to Documentation, Discussions and community contributed documents.

o Added Events Calendar for exclusive developer / administrator topics - visit our VMware Coffee Talk Webinars for more info

o Consolidated our Community Contributed & VMware Sample Code into one site we call Code Central

o Updated the VMware Icons for the vSphere platform

We ran a very successful vSphere SDK lab at Partner Exchange / Tech Exchange a few weeks ago in Orlando. For those of you who missed the event, I'm posting the manuals and code files. Going through the lab is a great way to get started with the API and includes handy sample code for modification or inclusion in your own programs.

The lab covers both the Java and C# versions of the VI SDK and uses the vSphere Web Services SDK 4.0 (formerly VI SDK 4.0). Though the lab doesn't cover any vSphere-specific features, I haven't tested it with VI SDK 2.5 and it will probably require some minor modification. For scripters that would prefer an introduction to the vSphere Perl SDK (formerly the VI Perl Toolkit) or the vSphere PowerCLI (formerly VI Toolkit for Windows), I posted a similar lab for those in an earlier blog post.

Exercises cover all the basics for using the SDK:
* Understanding managed objects and data objects
* Connecting to the VI API webservice
* getting the properties of managed objects using the PropertyCollector
* Using the SearchIndex
* Finding objects using TraversalSpecs
* Finding objects based on arbitrary criteria
* Collecting properties of multiple objects at the same time
* Understanding performance differences in some basic property collection strategies
* Monitoring properties for changes
* Monitoring tasks for completion
* Gathering performance statistics

There's obviously a lot more to do in the SDK, but once you've mastered those basic skills, most of the rest of the SDK is just an extension of what you already know. The exercises on collecting multiple objects properties at the same time and understanding performance differences due to property collector strategies cover some common problems I see with the management ecosystem partners I handle and are a great review for anyone trying to make sure their SDK code scales well.

A few things to note: I didn't update the doc with the new names of the various API components... I wrote the lab while those names were still under development. Also, I want to thank the other folks who helped put this lab together: Balaji Parimi (who wrote the Java code), Rajesh Kamal (who wrote the C# code), Alton Yu, John Kennedy, Paul Vasquez, and Steve Jin.

While most of the code handles errors gracefully and follows best practices, I’d like to point out that the code here is designed to teach concepts, not to be “enterprise ready”.

Folks - we are very excited about what is new in our SDKs and Toolkits and encourage everyone to start asking questions and discussing the APIs / Toolkits you used during the Beta and Release Candidate Programs.

First thing you need to know is that we have changed the names to support the vSphere platform. See chart below.

Audience	VI 3.X	vSphere 4.0
Developer	VI SDK	vSphere Web Services SDK
Developer	VI Perl Toolkit	vSphere SDK for Perl
Developer	VI SDK for Java (Tech Preview)	vSphere SDK for Java (Tech Preview)
Developer	Guest SDK	vSphere Guest SDK
Administrator	VI Toolkit for Windows	vSphere PowerCLI
Administrator	VI RCLI	vSphere vCLI
Administrator	VI Management Assistant	vSphere Management Assistant

Our SDKs and Toolkits support the new vSphere features and are backward compatible with your applications you have written for VI 3.x (from VI SDK 2.5 and up). (Warning I am in marketing - but if you have run into any compat. issues please let us know)

We will also be making some website changes and will keep the community posted as we progress.

In terms of availability we will be releasing our SDKs and Toolkits at the same time as the vSphere platform releases.



Thanks for your support - please keep the feedback coming and leverage our communities to share ideas, get answers.

One more thing in terms of RC access, please work with your local VMware representative for access. TAP Partners should use the http://www.vmware.com/partners/tap-vi-beta.html?elq=29193AF14EA640589E1C76856F80692C

Regards,
Pablo Roesch
http://vmware.com/developer

(image borrowed from http://www.fiveruns.com/images/developers.png?1234384652)

Folks,

Thought it would be good to highlight some sessions that might be of interest to our TAP partners building performance monitoring applications...

Preetham will provide an introduction and update on what is new and exciting with our SDK and APIs.
Session Title: SDKs and APIs - Tools for Successful Integration with the Next Generation of VMware Infrastructure
ID: VI-02 (1hr)

Our experts from Co Dev team will be providing some lessons learned and best practices...
Session Title: VI SDK Usage Best Practices and Upcoming Features
ID: VI-05 (1hr)

This is the first time Kit will be presenting to our TAP partners and should be a sell out,, register early
Session Title: Understanding "Host" and "Guest" Memory Usage and Other VI Memory Statistics
ID: VI-06

Ravi and Preetham will be providing a deeper dive into our monitoring APIs
**Session Title:**Application Performance Monitoring through VI APIs
ID: VI-03 (1hr)

This will be an awesome Lab !
Lab Title: VI SDK Programming: Automating, Integrating, and Extending the VDC-OS
ID: HOLSDK (2hr 15min)Hands On Lab

There are plenty of more sessions - please take a look Complete Agenda

Registration and more Event Info

Folks very happy to announce the VMware Infrastructure SDK for Java Tech Preview ! Take a test ride, give us your feedback. We want to make this one of the very best tools for building the very best Virtual Data Center OS.

SDK contains sample code, libraries, documentation - Visit our forums - give us feedback http://vmware.com/go/sdkforjava