With the release of VSAN 6.2 (vSphere 6.0 Update 2), a new VSAN Management API has been introduced which covers all aspects of VSAN functionality including: complete lifecycle (install, upgrade, patch), monitoring (including VSAN Observer capabilities), configuration and troubleshooting. Although there is a well documented VSAN Management API Reference Guide which you can navigate around, I personally find it useful to be able to have a quick reference to all the APIs in on place which I can easily search and reference. This is especially true when I am learning about a new API.
With that, I have created a "Quick Reference" of the new VSAN 6.2 Management API. You can find a screenshot below as well as the direct link to the quick reference. I used Draw.io to create the diagram but it is not just a static image of all the new Managed Objects and their respective methods, but each API method also links back to the VSAN Management API Reference Guide and best of all, because it is in HTML, you can easily search in the quick reference itself.
I initially had created this for myself, but I figure that others could also benefit. I am curious if others find this useful and whether we should have something like this as part of the official VSAN Management API Reference Guide?
VSAN Management 6.2 API Quick Reference: https://s3.amazonaws.com/virtuallyghetto-download/vsanapi.html
Can we expect the vSAN API to be slowly extracted from vCenter and made more "stand alone"? Or is using the vc provided methods still a safe course of action?
Already replied to the Reddit thread but I'll post the reply here as well.
vCenter Server is still the recommended solution for managing and configuring your VSAN environment. It goes beyond just initial setup of the VSAN Cluster but also provisioning and integration of the VM Storage Policies in which you can perform periodic compliance checks. All of these along with many more capabilities are all exposed in the new VSAN 6.2 APIs which are fully supported w/vCenter Server.
Having said that, much of the VSAN Management APIs already exists directly on the ESXi host and in fact, you can boostrap VSAN w/o VC as I've shown in this article here http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2013/09/how-to-bootstrap-vcenter-server-onto_9.html Longer term, VSAN will also be able to support nextgen platforms like VMware's Photon Controller which does not use vCenter Server, so you can see that its been designed to be flexible to support existing customers using vCenter Server as well as platforms like Photon Controller for building Cloud Native Apps.