vSphere 5.1 has been officially released and with all the new features and enhancements of the vSphere platform, there are also new vSphere APIs that are available for administrators, developers and partners to integrate and automate with.
vSphere API
Here is a quick look at just a few of the new vSphere 5.1 APIs:
Ability to specify a default Virtual Machine Compatibility (Virtual Hardware Version) at the Datacenter level, which helps guarantee a particular VM compatibility using the ReconfigureDatacenter_Task
Enable the new VDS (Virtual Distributed Switch) Health check feature which allows you to quickly determine if you have any miss-configurations in your physical network setup such as incorrect MTU, missing VLAN entries or network adapter teaming using the UpdateDVSHealthCheckConfig_Task
Another very cool feature in vSphere 5.1 is the ability to backup and restore your VDS configurations. This can be very useful to have prior to making any changes on your VDS and/or Distributed Portgroups using the new DVSManagerExportEntity_Task and to be able to quickly restore in case a mistake was made by using the new DVSManagerImportEntity_Task
To get the complete list of the new vSphere 5.1 API managed object types, methods and properties, be sure to check out the vSphere 5.1 API Reference Guide which provides a “What’s New” section.
vSphere Web Client SDK
In addition to the new vSphere 5.1 API, we are also introducing the new vSphere Web Client SDK which will allow developers and partners build and extend the new vSphere Web Client user interface. The new vSphere Web Client has been designed from the ground up to have an extensible framework and below is a quick glance at some of the extension points that are available.
Extending vSphere Objects
Extending Sub-Tabs to vSphere Objects
Adding Custom Objects to Inventory
As you can see the new vSphere Web Client is extremely customizable and I am looking forward to seeing all the new plugins from our partners and community!
Finally we also have the new vCenter Single Sign-On SDK which provides support for developing custom client applications leveraging SAML tokens for authentication to the vCenter SSO Server for access. This allows developers to get the same benefit of vCenter SSO with your own custom client applications without having to worry about managing multiple logins.
Extending Sub-Tabs to vSphere Objects
Adding Custom Objects to Inventory
