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.
