Accepted Solutions
Yup. In Perl, you can use --verbose on the command line of any script and it will spit out out the raw XML. I'm not sure if Python has a debug option that is similar or not. You could use that to capture some your SOAP "templates" and just do the appropriate search and replace where necessary. Example:
REQUEST: $VAR1 = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<soapenv:Body>
<ReconfigVM_Task xmlns="urn:vim25"><_this type="VirtualMachine">vm-100</_this>
<spec><deviceChange><operation>edit</operation><device xsi:type="VirtualDisk"><key>2000</key><deviceInfo><label>Hard disk 1</label><summary>524,288 KB</summary></deviceInfo><backing xsi:type="VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo"><fileName>[GlobalDS_0] DC0_C0_RP6_VM7/DC0_C0_RP6_VM7.vmdk</fileName><datastore type="Datastore">datastore-30</datastore>
<diskMode>persistent</diskMode><split>0</split><writeThrough>0</writeThrough><thinProvisioned>0</thinProvisioned><uuid>520ee694-2b4b-6f6e-9c13-f89af8ac8554</uuid></backing><controllerKey>1000</controllerKey><unitNumber>0</unitNumber><capacityInKB>524288</capacityInKB><shares><shares>3670072</shares><level>low</level></shares><storageIOAllocation><limit>10</limit></storageIOAllocation></device></deviceChange></spec></ReconfigVM_Task></soapenv:Body></soapenv:Envelope>
';
RESPONSE: $VAR1 = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<soapenv:Body>
<ReconfigVM_TaskResponse xmlns="urn:vim25"><returnval type="Task">task-1223</returnval></ReconfigVM_TaskResponse>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>';
It's a bit painful when you start dealing with objects from several sources and building envelopes by hand can get brutal when you move into nested objects in the XML. But if you got a small set of operations and objects to deal with, should work with some regex. There are a few other places it may get tricky, for example, sometimes you have inherited objects of a specific type and they get serialized by specifying the type depending on the object. In that case you'll need to preserve the type and value when passing those objects around.
An example is the VirtualDevice here:
<device xsi:type="VirtualDisk">...</device>
In this case it's a VirtualDisk, but it could also be a VirtualEthernetCard (VirtualE1000 is a child of VirtualEthernetCard), VirtualFloppy, VirtualCdrom, etc.
If you have a Python adapter, then look at PyVmomi. It will probably save you a lot of pain and misery long term 
Project Onyx used to support SOAP outputs as well, but not sure if that project is maintained, supported or even updated for later API versions.
You may be in for a world of pain Some of the calls are pretty deeply nested.
But the first problem will be the ManagedObjectReference (_this) in your example.
That is in the format of:
<_this type="vim25:Datacenter">datacenter-123</_this>
You will be slinging ManagedObjectReferences a lot. Same context:
<datacenter type="vim25:Datacenter">datacenter-123</_datacenter>
MoRef values are usually provided by other queries against the API.
Thanks!
I have done a lot of the work through PowerCLI which is not ideal as a middleware agent, hence transferring everything to use the API. So I'm quite familiar with using morefs, it's just that the SDK documentation really isn't for what I am trying to do 
So how did you get from VirtualDiskManager to vim25:Datacenter? What reference or tools do you use? I don't want to have to post a thread to figure out each HTTP request I come across!
Under the covers, all the SDKs (including PowerCLI) use the same calls, just wrap them for simplicity.
You'll have to parse your SOAP responses. You can get your target MoRefs from a lot of sources - RetrievePropertiesEx, SearchIndex.FindBy* calls, etc. Like I said, raw SOAP parsing against the vSphere API is painful. I just converted most of it into JSON for a simple Perl module (speed and memory optimization) and it was 2801 entity types and 615 operations
You definitely can't integrate say PyVmomi or VIPerl into the toolset?
Yup. In Perl, you can use --verbose on the command line of any script and it will spit out out the raw XML. I'm not sure if Python has a debug option that is similar or not. You could use that to capture some your SOAP "templates" and just do the appropriate search and replace where necessary. Example:
REQUEST: $VAR1 = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<soapenv:Body>
<ReconfigVM_Task xmlns="urn:vim25"><_this type="VirtualMachine">vm-100</_this>
<spec><deviceChange><operation>edit</operation><device xsi:type="VirtualDisk"><key>2000</key><deviceInfo><label>Hard disk 1</label><summary>524,288 KB</summary></deviceInfo><backing xsi:type="VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo"><fileName>[GlobalDS_0] DC0_C0_RP6_VM7/DC0_C0_RP6_VM7.vmdk</fileName><datastore type="Datastore">datastore-30</datastore>
<diskMode>persistent</diskMode><split>0</split><writeThrough>0</writeThrough><thinProvisioned>0</thinProvisioned><uuid>520ee694-2b4b-6f6e-9c13-f89af8ac8554</uuid></backing><controllerKey>1000</controllerKey><unitNumber>0</unitNumber><capacityInKB>524288</capacityInKB><shares><shares>3670072</shares><level>low</level></shares><storageIOAllocation><limit>10</limit></storageIOAllocation></device></deviceChange></spec></ReconfigVM_Task></soapenv:Body></soapenv:Envelope>
';
RESPONSE: $VAR1 = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<soapenv:Body>
<ReconfigVM_TaskResponse xmlns="urn:vim25"><returnval type="Task">task-1223</returnval></ReconfigVM_TaskResponse>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>';
It's a bit painful when you start dealing with objects from several sources and building envelopes by hand can get brutal when you move into nested objects in the XML. But if you got a small set of operations and objects to deal with, should work with some regex. There are a few other places it may get tricky, for example, sometimes you have inherited objects of a specific type and they get serialized by specifying the type depending on the object. In that case you'll need to preserve the type and value when passing those objects around.
An example is the VirtualDevice here:
<device xsi:type="VirtualDisk">...</device>
In this case it's a VirtualDisk, but it could also be a VirtualEthernetCard (VirtualE1000 is a child of VirtualEthernetCard), VirtualFloppy, VirtualCdrom, etc.
If you have a Python adapter, then look at PyVmomi. It will probably save you a lot of pain and misery long term Project Onyx used to support SOAP outputs as well, but not sure if that project is maintained, supported or even updated for later API versions.
Yeah, haven't used Onyx in a while, but it was really useful. Glad that worked. You were going to start throwing things trying to hand build the SOAP calls 