Official VC plugin documentation released; new SDK book on the way
VMware has released an official guide to writing VC plugins: see VMware Infrastructure (VI) SDK 2.5. Note:Support for VI Client Plug-ins is Experimental, and is subject to change in future releases.
VI Client Plug-ins
With the release of VirtualCenter 2.5, VMware offers third-party developers and partners the ability to extend the VMware Infrastructure Client (VI Client) with their own product-specific menu selections or toolbar icons that provide access to external, Web-based functionality. These extensions, or VI Client Plug-ins, comprise the set of configuration files, URLs, icons, and Web-server-hosted resources that work together to display extended menu items, icons, and other user interface (UI) items in the VI Client and provide access to the external functionality.
Stu @ vinternals likes it. Link: vinternals: First Official VI Client Plug-in Document Released - round of applause for VC architects / devs!.
Outstanding! On the coding side, it looks so straight forward that even a hacker like me should be able to put something together fairly easily... running off the example in the document, you could pretty easily add a context menu item to ESX hosts that fires up the out of band management web interface (ie the iLO page for HP kit) of that particular host.
In related news, Schley Andrew Kutz, who managed to reverse engineer the plugin SDK before this, is writing a book for O'Reilly. He's asking for feedback and/or code samples at VMware Communities. Link: VMware Communities: Announcing "Programming and Managing ....
This book will be the definitive guide for systems administrators and developers eager to make use of the VI and CIM SDKs. The book shows their use with several popular languages, including the VI Perl Toolkit and VI Toolkit (for Windows) as well as C#, Java, and Python. Advanced topics, such as creating client plugins and communicating with VMware through its web service, are also covered.
This text demystifies the VI SDK, transforming the difficult task of searching the VI inventory into a simple one.
Hat tip to Pablo, Scott, David, and Eric for bringing me the news.
FYI - I will be writing a blog that compares and contrasts the official plugin guide to the one I created in order to help readers understand the differences and what the pros and cons are of each.
Posted by: Andrew Kutz | April 21, 2008 at 11:23 AM
You can find out how the official plugins stack up to unofficial plugins at http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/vmware-releases-official-plugin-guide/. :)
Posted by: Andrew Kutz | April 21, 2008 at 12:55 PM