VMware Cloud Community
SensusDCops
Contributor
Contributor

Need vCenter/vSphere XML API Endpoint

Hi All,

We're trying to interrogate the vCenter XML API to pull inventory and performance data. However the documentation surrounding this is lacking. Can someone point us to the right direction to pull both vCenter's XML API endpoint and some example queries to pull inventory and performance data?

Currently running vCenter 7.0.3 (7.0.3.01400)

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lamw
Community Manager
Community Manager

vCenter Server provides an API (vSphere API) which includes both a SOAP interface and REST interface, both of which are documented https://developer.vmware.com/apis/1639/vsphere and https://developer.vmware.com/apis/vsphere-automation/latest/ 

VMware has a number of SDK or language bindings that makes it easy to interact with either API such as using Python, Go or PowerShell as some examples. You can certainly build your own "client" but typically not recommended or typical, just like you'd use SDK to access other product/services API. 

As of vSphere 8.0 Update 1, you can also consume the SOAP API via a new JSON wire format, see https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2023/06/12/automating-vsphere-workflows-with-vi-json/ and https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2023/06/26/integrating-vi-json-in-pyvmomi-scripts/ for two different ways to consume rather than typical SOAP-base SDKs