Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl

[#1]

Author: William Lam
Twitter: @lamw
Website: http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

Step 1. Visit the vSphere SDK for Perl Home Page

• vSphere™ SDK for Perl

You will find latest Downloads, Reference Documentation and Community Discussions and links to resources.

Step 2. Become familiar with vSphere SDK for Perl Resources:

• Support Information: vSphere, VI 3.x SDK - Support Information
• VMware Code Central (Sample Code) : SDK for Perl
• Take a look at Getting Started with vSphere SDKs - Updated for SDK 4.1 release document

Step 3. Explore new ways of managing your vSphere Platform using the remote CLI

• Try some of the esxcfg-* commands using vSphere SDK for Perl scripts 
  • RCLI - http://engr.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/#vmware_rcli
  • vCLI - http://engr.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/#vmware_vcli

• Additional utilities bundled with vCLI/RCLI installation 
  • VI Perl Toolkit Utility Application Reference
  • vSphere SDK for Perl Utility Application Reference

Step 4. Develop and create your own scripts and utlities using the vSphere SDK for Perl

• Become familiar vSphere 4.0 API Reference documentation 
  • vSphere 4.0 - http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk400pubs/ReferenceGuide/index.html
  • VI 3.5 - http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk25pubs/ReferenceGuide/index.html

• Learn how to get started with writing your own Perl script using vSphere SDK for Perl 
  • http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/viperltoolkit/doc/perl_toolkit_appliance_idx.html

• I think the easiest way to learn this is to start playing with some  of the canned scripts and to make it even easier to have an environment  that's all setup for you with both the vCLI and vSphere SDK for Perl, you can download VMware vMA.  vMA is a Redhat Enterprise 5 Linux Virtual Appliance to allow  administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage  ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems remotely.

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FAQ

1. What is difference between vSphere API and vSphere SDK for Perl?

Let's define two very important vocabulary words -

Wikipedia defines an API as:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface

Application programming interface (API) is an  interface in computer science that defines the ways by which an  application program may request services from libraries and/or operating  systems

An API may be:

• Language-dependent; that is, available only in a given programming  language, using the syntax and elements of that language to make the API  convenient to use in this context.

• Language-independent; that is, written in a way that means it can be  called from several programming languages (typically an assembly or C  interface). This is a desired feature for a service-style API that is  not bound to a given process or system and is available as a remote  procedure call.Wikipedia defines SDK as:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sdk

A software development kit (SDK or "devkit") is  typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to  create applications for a certain software package, software framework,  hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating  system, or similar platform.

It may be something as simple as an application programming interface  (API) in the form of some files to interface to a particular programming  language or include sophisticated hardware to communicate with a  certain embedded system.Simply put, VMware exposes the VI3/vSphere 4 API  as a Web Service API that utilizes (WSDL,SOAP and HTTP) to access  server-side objects. From the above API defintion, an API can be language-indepednent, which is exactly what  VMware has done to allow development from the various rich scripting and  programming languages such as Perl, PowerCLI, C#, .net and Java. These  are the various SDK's or "bindings" that have been created to  allow administrators and developers to write a simple scripts to  automate a task or complex applications to monitor, deploy or configure  the wide ranges of componets in the VI/vSphere platform.

2. What is difference between RCLI and vCLI?

With the advent of ESXi which is basically ESX without the Service  Console, managing and configuring ESXi has slightly changed. VMware  wanted to provide some continutity when managing and configuring ESXi  and decided to duplicate majority of the esxcfg-* commands and  functionality into a set of "remote" esxcfg-* commands which  utilizes the VI/vSphere API and hence RCLI/vCLI was born. The RCLI  (Remote Command Line Interface) has been renamed to vCLI (vSphere  Command Line Interface) with the release of vSphere.

Here is a table of the new vSphere names from the old VI3 names for the various SDKs/APIs/Toolkits

Audience	vSphere 4.0	VMware Infrastructure 3.x
Developer	vSphere Web Services SDK 4.0\	VMware Infrastructure SDK
Developer	vSphere SDK for Perl 4.0\	VMware Infrastructure Perl Toolkit
Developer	vSphere SDK for Java (Tech Preview)\	VMware Infrastructure for Java (Tech Preview)
Administrator	vSphere PowerCLI 4.0\	VMware Infrastructure Toolkit for Windows
Developer	vSphere Guest SDK 4.0\	VMware Guest SDK
Developer	VIX API 1.7\	VIX API
Developer	Virtual Disk Development Kit 1.1\	Virtual Disk Development Kit
Developer	VMware Studio 1.0\	VMware Studio 1.0
Developer	CIM SDK 4.0\	CIM SDK
Administrator	vSphere Management Assistant 4.0 (vMA 4.0)\	VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA 1.0)
Administrator	vSphere Command Line Interface (vCLI) 4.0\	VMware Infrastructure RCLI
Administrator	VMware OVF Tool 1.0\	Not Available

[navadavuluri]

Great article, seems like the perfect path for mastering the SDK for Perl