The SDK documentation section on storing persistent data for a plugin only covers a single method, which is to store it in a local file that is specific to the VCenter instance and UI variant (Flex/HTML) that is being used at the time.
This method gives a very inconsistent user experience - changing between the two clients, or doing a failover in a VCSA HA environment effectively resets the plugin to its initial state. I expect that using linked mode would suffer similar issues, but haven't tested that as yet.
The SDK documentation just says "you must use a separate back end server or database" for complex/large data sets. However, to do that, the plugin needs to store the URL/credentials of that back-end server to be able to connect to it - so that suffers exactly the same problem as above.
Is there a way for a plugin to store a small amount of private information in the VCenter object database itself - at least enough to connect to a back-end server? I can see a workaround using tags/custom attributes, but this seems extremely ugly, and would be visible to the user (so prone to editing/corruption/information disclosure).
