Mike D’s Blog

This year there are a TON of labs at VMworld. Right now we’re set to offer an even 30 hands-on labs at VMworld where you can play with nearly every product VMware offers. There will be plenty of seats this year as well – over 450. We’ll also have extended hours at the labs.

The reason I’m writing this post is to let you know about the vCloud API lab that I’m the captain of. There’s been a lot of talk and activity around the first cloud API submitted to the DMTF for standardization. This lab is your chance to get your hands dirty with the API. You don’t have to be a programmer to get through the lab so everyone’s welcome.

Of course if you are a developer then there’s a lot more than just the vCloud API lab to go through. There are 4 different API labs so you can learn how to programmatically work with all of the VMware products. What’s more is we also have a technology exchange for developers running concurrently with VMworld. It’s sort of a mini-conference within a conference with sessions strictly for developers.

To find out more about VMworld or to register so you can get in the labs just go to the main VMworld website.

To find out more about the Technology Exchange for Developers see their site.

Here’s a full listing of the hands-on API labs that will be at VMworld. As you can see, we have some heavy hitters as captains of the labs.

LAB16 – VMware vCloud™ API

The VMware vCloud™ API is the key to VMware’s story around federation and ecosystem with the cloud. In this lab we will introduce you to the API and what it can do. You will use real world scenarios to explore the API and figure out when and how to consume the API with several different programming languages. If you are building a cloud then eventually you will need to know about the VMware vCloud™ API and this lab will get you ready for that. No prior programming experience is required although you will definitely benefit from general programming concept knowledge (methods, functions, etc).

Lab Captain: Mike Dipetrillo, and Mike Haines

LAB26 – VMware vSphere™ PowerCLI

This lab will provide hands on training for scripting a VMware environment. The goal is to provide all the tools needed to automate, integrate, and extend VMware vCenter™ for your environment. Attendees will use the Microsoft PowerShell based PowerCLI for scripting VMware vCenter™ and ESX. They’ll walk away from the lab with a better understanding of VMware Infrastructure, resources for using the toolkit, and a variety of scripts for performing common administrative tasks. Exercises will cover performing tasks based on VM attributes, performing actions on many VMs at a time, and exporting performance data. This lab does not require programming or scripting experience.

Lab Captain: Alton Yu

LAB27 – VMware vSphere™ Web Services SDK – C# (.Net Developers rejoice)

This lab will provide hands on training for using the C# SDK in a VMware vSphere™ environment. The goal is to provide an introduction to the key concepts in using the SDK to automate and extend VMware vSphere™ functionality. Attendees will use the SDK to connect and perform tasks against VMware vCenter™ and ESX. They’ll walk away from the lab with a better understanding of VMware vSphere™, resources for using the API for performing common administrative tasks as well as extending the product functionality. Exercises will cover performing tasks based on VM attributes, performing actions on many VMs at a time, and exporting performance data etc. This lab does require some scripting/programming experience.

Lab Captain: Alket Memushaj

LAB28 – VMware vSphere™ Web Services SDK – Java

This lab will provide hands on training for scripting a VMware environment. The goal is to provide all the tools needed to automate, integrate, and extend VMware vCenter™ for your environment. Attendees will use the Java Web Services API against VMware vCenter™ and ESX. They’ll walk away from the lab with a better understanding of VMware Infrastructure and resources for using the API while performing common administrative tasks. Exercises will cover automation based on VM attributes, bulk actions on multiple VMs, and querying performance data. This lab does not require programming or scripting experience.

Lab Captain: Gilbert Lau

Tags: VMworld

Calling all coding hacks!

Back in December, VMware launched the VMware Script-O-Mania contest. The goal of the Script-O-Mania contest is to help our wider community adopt ESXi by providing useful, fun and powerful scripts to manage the ESXi platform. But this isn’t just fun and games – there’s real prizes!

• 1st Prize $2,500
• 2nd Prize $1,000
• 3rd Prize $500

So polish off those scripting skills and get coding. The contest ends on March 15, 2010. You can find full details and submit your entry here.

Recently, Fujitsu submitted their cloud API to the DMTF for consideration in the standards process. The news caught my eye a long time ago and I read up on the effort a long time ago but just never got around to blogging about it. Well, here I am with time to blog so let me give you a quick run down of what’s going on and then link you to a great post by William Vanbenepe for more detailed information.

VMware had submitted our vCloud API to the DMTF a while back. This was an effort to get the conversation and process started on creating a standardized cloud API for all to use. We don’t expect that ours will be the end result of this process. We really just did the submission to spark the discussion (although we also think ours is a good start). Fujitsu was the first to follow with a submission although there are others out there with an API (Amazon, Rackspace, Google, SUN, etc). Hopefully the others will submit their thoughts and participate in this process.

So what is this Fujitsu API? It’s actually less of an API and more of a definition of interconnects. I mean there are no functions per-se. Nothing to program against. It’s really interesting to see what they wrote up. I think if you combine their submission with the VMware submission you get some overlap in definitions but they really do provide a good synergy.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d make everyone aware of what’s going on. This will be a long process and we probably won’t see the first draft until the end of 2010 at the earliest. If you happen to work for or work with one of the other companies that has an API out there then encourage them to work with this process so we can get something the ISV ecosystem can really get behind. I’ve said it once and will say it 1,000 times – standards is the only way this cloud thing is going to work and stick around.

Read more on the details of the Fujitsu API at William’s blog.

It was a busy week last week in Cannes. I had a great time meeting everyone and talking about the exciting stuff that VMware is doing in the cloud space. It was especially nice to see all of the great cloud demos during Steve Herrod’s keynote on Wednesday. The keynote really showed off what VMware and our partners are doing in the cloud space. It also showed off the power of the VMware vCloud API. If you’re interested in the vCloud API then now is the time to visit the cloud site and register for the beta program (it’s over to the right) which will be launching soon. There’s a short survey to walk through and then you’ll be notified when the beta goes live. Until then you can stop back by here where I’ll continue to dive into the VMware cloud offerings and blog about the details.

Now it’s back to catching up on all of the exciting things I saw last week at VMworld and post them on this blog.

As many of you know I just can’t keep my hands out of the different API sets that VMware offers. From Powershell to VIX to Java it’s all there. The product set is incredibly extensible. I was getting back up to speed on our Java API and found out that the new API set was just released as beta. For those of you in love with Java you’ll be happy to know you don’t need AXIS anymore (it was a royal pain to setup). For more information on the beta or to try it out for yourself just continue reading below or go here.

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The new and greatly improved VI Toolkit for Windows has been updated to version 1.5. Below are some videos showing off the new features.

I must say that I really love PowerShell and the VI Toolkit. This thing is so powerful it’s awesome! I got the privilege of doing an informal video interview with Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for the VI Toolkit, when I was out at corporate last week. I’m working on getting that video up on the blog real soon. Carter talks more about the plans for the VI Toolkit and shows off some really nice scripts. I actually shot about 8 hours of video with different people while out there so keep watching the blog for those behind the scenes interviews coming soon.

For the full list of VI Toolkit videos go here.

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I wrote a few days ago that the ESXi 3.5 U3 update unlocked the API set. Well, this was only partially true. I was just trying out some power operations and the command line kept staring back at me blank. I went back and pinged some of the folks in engineering and low and behold I ran into bigger issues. Turns out that while fixing an API bug the API set got partially unlocked. Yes, you read that right, VMware didn’t mean to unlock the API set – at least not wholly and not yet.

So, if you went out and started madly coding some killer VirtualCenter Client replacement then hold off because I’m told the U4 update will lock things back down again. Good news is that only customers who are using the free version of ESXi have been affected. VirtualCenter and VI (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise) customers are not affected since they had rights to the API set all along.

That’s what I get for running off and blogging about new finds too quick.

Rich over at VM/Etc and Duncan over at Yellow-Bricks both blogged about the fact that the VMware RCLI now does read/write to the free ESXi version. This is really great news. Prior to ESXi 3.5 U3 the RCLI was read-only meaning you could get a listing of portgroups for example but you couldn’t add any. This also broke some free scripts out there like the Quick Migration script I had written sometime back. I thought this was a little short sighted although I can understand some of the reasoning. I pushed hard with engineering and they understood my case and quickly worked to unlock the API all the way down the stack. Kudos to engineering for that quick work. Not sure why but you won’t find any press releases about this – just a few people picking it up on blogs. Just to show it working I have a few pictures from my lab here at the house.

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I’m a huge fan of open source. Here at VMware there are several open source projects. One such project that I recently ran across is the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Java APIs (that’s a mouthful). Basically this is a set of APIs that makes it easier for Java programmers to write to the standard VMware SDK. The VMware SDK is based on web services and if you’ve ever tried to do anything web services oriented you know it’s a pain (at least I think so). I’ve been working a lot in Cocoa on my Mac building a Mac based Virtual Center client as well as an iPhone Virtual Center client. All I can tell you is I was a fan of web services until I started these projects. Of course Coca and web services together is just plain horrible. Enough of a rant and back to the Java API.

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