Agent SDK - Where is it?

[jonsilver]

I was under the impression, that VMHA monitors 1) ESXI, 2) Guest OS 3) Applications on Guest

1) comes free as part of the package

2) comes free with VM Tools

3) is something that the customer needs to provide.

I am looking to provide 3).

Is there any documentation / SDK available?  I simply cannot find it. I was given

        https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/sdk_pubs.html

but I can't find it there.

Does anyone know where to get and how to download it?

thnaks,

jonathan

[lamw · Accepted solution]

Hi,

vSphere HA monitors the host for failures and will restart VMs on other hosts - You can take a look at this blog post for more details - http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/

VMHA monitors Virtual Machines by checking a hearbeat which is sent by VMware Tools installed within the guest - You can take a look at this blog post for some more details - http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/06/04/vm-monitoring-aka-vm-ha-heartbeat/

There is also something called AppHA which allows you to monitor an application within the guestOS and have HA restart the VM if it detects a failure (there are some 3rd parties who have written some software and you can develop your own) - You can take a look at this blog post more details http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/08/new-application-awareness-api-in.html

Regarding your other questions:

1) All three of these features are available with a license that includes vSphere HA, so if you can enable HA then you have these features at your disposal

2) Yes, you will need to have VMware Tools for the latter two options, vSphere HA is for host, so you don't need to have VMware Tools for that to function

3) Nothing a customer needs to provide. If you want to develop your own AppHA solution, then please refer to the 3rd link which includes a link to the AppHA SDK

[jonsilver]

LamW,

    Thanks for the port - great info. It took some real searching, but I was able to finf the Download SDK at  https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/details?downloadGroup=HASDK50&productId=229  but it only contains files for windows - no linux ?? any ideas? Wrong download?

[lamw]

If you login with your VMTN account, you'll find that both a zip (Windows) and tar.gz (Linux) will be available for download.

The linux file name is called VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK-425873.tar.gz

I verified using FF on both a Mac and Windows system

[jonsilver]

drugs. Sorry and thanks again.

[jonsilver]

I've installed vmtool and I see the deamon running.

I've installed the SDK.

I compiled and tried to run the sample (sample.c)

but the sample returns 4  (VMGUESTAPPMONITORLIB_ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED) when trying to enable monitoring

  (calling VMGuestAppMonitor_Enable).

What can I do to figure out why and what is missing? Yes, I have not yet installed HA on my vCenter, but that should not matter ??

thanks for any help

jonathan

[lamw]

I assume your enviornment is running all vSphere 5 (e.g. vCenter 5.0 and ESXI 5.0)? You should enable vSphere HA, but I think you should be able to get the samples working without it but I'm not 100% sure. The best thing is to enable vSphere HA and App Monitoringn for your development VM which has the SDK installed and try it again.

[jonsilver]

I thought that it was, but now I see that this specific machine has an old 4.0 ESXI. I'll upgrade or move to a different machine

sorry and thanks

[jonsilver]

lamv - THANKS. Got it to run. Now the final question.

We package up our system / solution. Can we ship the SDK with our product? I believe that we install VMtools, but I'm not sure about the SDK libs.

Our end customers will have all of the neccessary licenses - they buy them directly from VMware (although, I beleive that we are also resllers now)

thanks again,

jonathan

[lamw]

I'm not sure if you can package the SDK itself, you may want to double check the EULA but also reach out to your local VMware account rep if you're part of the TAP program. They can definitely help answer that if you're a partner