VMware Networking Blog

vSphere has SDKs and APIs for just about every component, feature and product (including the new vCloud API!). Just take a look at the VMware developer site. This is a powerful adjunct to vSphere enabling extremely powerful virtualization solutions.

But this is a networking blog, so let’s talk about the vNetwork API. This is already a powerful toolset enabling you to extend the capabilities of your network. But we’re not stopping there. Those of you who caught Howie Xu’s (Director, R&D) presentation at VMworld would have caught a glimpse of how we are enhancing monitoring, management and configuration through the toolset. (You can download Howie’s presentation here).

A few VMware developments worth highlighting:

• Wireshark Plug-ins. Wireshark is a great tool for frame-by-frame dissection of your network traffic. You can just install Wireshark in a Windows or Linux guest VM on a promiscuous vswitch port and away you go (select appropriate VLAN via the Port Group or all with VLAN=4095). The plug-ins add additional protocol dissectors so you can get analyses of VMotion, HA heartbeats, FT logging and so on (look at Howie’s presentation for some screenshots).
• vDS cmdlets for PowerCLI. The VMware vSphere PowerCLI is another great tool for scripting and automating vSphere tasks. The vDS cmdlets are an extension for deploying and operating vDS. e.g creating, modifying, and deleting vDS, dvPortGroups, etc. Donghai Han created a YouTube demonstration video you can see here.
• ESX Network Toolkit (ENT). This is toolkit that leverages a Probe VM to sanity check your virtual network environment for misconfigurations. Again, look at Howie’s presentation for some screenshots.

Note that these tools are not available just yet (sorry!). When ready, we’ll post them to the VMware Communities vNetwork API site, so be sure to check back. (I’ll also write a blog post)