What is the support status for VMWare.Vim library?

[zfgerwui]

I have been researching ways to implement a Windows forms application that could manage our ESX servers.  Basically, there are four options:

1. VIX API - deprecated, so do not want to use the vmrun utility either, since it might be depenedent on the VIX libraries.

2. vSphere Web Services SDK - should work, but supposedly complicated.

3. PowerCLI - have used this some - no problems, but would prefer to have more flexibility and not call a script from C#.

4. vSphere SDK for .NET - works, my preferred choice, but cannot find comprehensive documentation for all the methods in it.

There is documentation here for the web services sdk http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.wssdk.apiref.doc%2Fright-pane.html.

There is documentation here for some basic operations for the vSphere SDK for .NET http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.powercli.dg.doc_50%2Fvsphere_powercl..., but not comprehensive documentation.  There is a link on that page to http://www.vmware.com/download/sdk/index.html , which does not have a reference to vSphere SDK for .NET, but does have a reference to vCloud SDK for .NET.

So my questions are:

1. is vSphere SDK for .NET deprecated in some way?

2. If not, where is the 5.1 documentation for it?

3. Since vSphere SDK for .NET is between PowerCLI and vSphere Web Services SDK in terms of complexity of implementation, is it a good choice for an ESX server project?

Thanks in advance.

[jeffpatton]

Just FYI I've written several functions in c# using the vmware.vim.dll, just click my icon in the thread and i think you can go to my discussions, or just searhc for using vmware.vim. Nobody has responded to any of my posts, so it's more like a build log that anything, the very last post has a .cs file with the functions i've created, which you may be able to port over for windows forms.