Just thought I'd share this bit 'o knowledge with the community. When building the VI Toolkits for .NET and Java I created methods for connecting to VI with an existing session cookie (like Perl and PowerShell). In .NET that looks like this:

// The next line is self-explanatory.
m_vim_svc_content =
m_vim_svc.RetrieveServiceContent( vim_svc_ref );

if ( GetOptionValue( "sessionfile" ) != null )
{
Trace.TraceInformation( "Connecting with session file" );

BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
Stream s = File.Open(
GetOptionValue( "sessionfile" ), FileMode.Open );
Cookie c = bf.Deserialize( s ) as Cookie;
s.Close();
m_vim_svc.CookieContainer.Add( c );
}

In the above example the session content is retrieved and then the Cookie object is deserialized from a text file where it was stored (you can store just the cookie value and create a new Cookie object as well, but storing the object by serializing it to a file means that the VI Toolkit for Windows (PowerShell) can use it as well).

In Java however, the same logic does not work. You have to do this:

m_vim_svc = vim_svc_loc.getVimPort( new java.net.URL( getVIUrl() ) );
VimBindingStub vbs = ( VimBindingStub ) m_vim_svc;
vbs.setMaintainSession( true );

if ( getOptionValue( "sessionfile" ) != null )
{
/*
* Load the session cookie. It is important that when using Axis,
* the session cookie is loaded BEFORE the service content is
* retrieved, otherwise the session will not be authenticated.
*/
String session_file = getOptionValue( "sessionfile" );
BufferedReader br =
new BufferedReader( new FileReader( session_file ) );
String session_cookie = br.readLine();
br.close();
vbs._setProperty(
org.apache.axis.transport.http.HTTPConstants.HEADER_COOKIE,
session_cookie );
m_vim_svc_content = m_vim_svc.retrieveServiceContent( vim_svc_ref );
}
else
{
m_vim_svc_content = m_vim_svc.retrieveServiceContent( vim_svc_ref );
m_vim_svc.login( m_vim_svc_content.getSessionManager(),
getOptionValue( "username" ), getOptionValue( "password" ),
null );
}

In Java you must set the cookie BEFORE you retrieve the service content. However, you still must retrieve the service content before you login via username and password.

I am putting this out there just in case one or two of you trip over the same issue.

Many thanks to Steve Jin @ VMware for pointing me in the right direction on this.

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Let's say there large number of concurrent client requests to ESX hostd coming from a mgmt application.
The app is running inside a VM and connects to the same ESX server that hosts the VM.

Each request makes similar VI SDK java api calls.

Is there a limit on the max number of concurrent sessions that are allowed? We see messages:
2008-08-26 14:45:36.833 'SoapAdapter' 22461360 error SOAP session count limit reached

Another question, is if we allow one client thread to establish a session cookie and other threads to reuse the same session cookie, would this give a substantial performance gain on the ESX server? (session pooling)

Is connection pooling possible?

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The documentation states that the session limit is set to 100.

This document was generated from the following thread: !! Session management with Cookies !!