I am trying to develop a remove vCenter Web Client Plugin. I have successfully deployed the plugin and have gotten a valid cloneTicket back from Vcenter for the currently logged in session. I pass that cloneTicket to the remove server where I attempt to make the SOAP client call the SessionManager.CloneSession() function and pass it the cloneTicket in order to get a user session from which I can use the key.

The vCenter server errors with:  "Server raised fault: 'The session is not authenticated.'"

Well off course it isn't authenticated. That's what I'm trying to do by passing it a valid cloneTicket to CloneSession() so that I can make a single SOAP call back to vCenter with the one time use token.

I've seen in the pyvmomi sample code where there is code to convert python suds cookies over to pyvmomi session cookies. The comments in the pyvmomi code note that there is no way to connect to call the CloneSession() function on vCenter through pyvmomi  without having already been logged in. Is this actually true?

This seems like a chicken or the egg problem. How can I call CloneSession() without already being logged in? Because if I could be already logged then I wouldn't need to call CloneSession().

Any suggestions on what course to take to resolve this little puzzle?