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Is there a vSphere REST API for ...

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Up until vSphere 8.0, there were two primary sets of vSphere APIs:

Note: Technically, there are other vCenter Server API endpoints including vSAN, Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM), etc. but for the purposes of this article, we are focusing on the core vCenter Server functionality.

The vSphere Web Services API was available starting with the Virtual Infrastructure (VI) 2.x release back in 2007. To date, the vSphere Web Services API supports the latest vSphere 8.x release and still also has full backwards compatibility going all the way back to Virtual Center 2.x!

As you can imagine, the vSphere Web Services API covers an extremely large amount of functionality over the past 16 years since its introduction and it continues to be widely used by almost all customers either directly or indirectly through the various vSphere SDKs including PowerCLI, pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python), govmomi (vSphere SDK for Go), Terraform Provider for vSphere to just name a few. In addition, we also have many 2nd party solutions from VMware and thousands of 3rd party offerings from our broader ecosystem of partners that provide integrations with the vSphere platform, all consuming the vSphere Web Services API!

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Getting Started with the Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu REST API

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An extremely powerful capability of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is not just getting application data and custom information into App Transformer, but that you can also easily extract that information and use that for a number of other scenarios including but not limited to internal true up of your deployed applications versus what is currently in your Change Management Database (CMDB), inventory analysis across your application vendor and/or versions for auditing, licensing and compliance to identifying vulnerable software versions. The use cases for App Transformer certainly span beyond just App Modernization and can truly be endless!


The App Transformer UI is just one way in which users can interact with the solution but for more advanced workflows or automation purposes, users can also leverage the App Transformer REST API. In this blog post, we take a look at how to get started with the App Transformer REST API.

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Using vRO REST API to execute a workflow with SDK objects

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I was working on something last week which involved vRealize Orchestrator and I wanted to execute a vRO worklfow but rather than using the UI, I wanted to use the vRO REST API. Although there are a couple of blog posts such as this one which demonstrates how to use the vRO REST API, they all use a very simple workflow that only contains string inputs. In my opinion, this does not actually reflect practical workflows which usually contains a mix of strings but also SDK-based objects like vSphere VMs, ESXi hosts, Networks, etc.

It actually took me awhile to wrap my head around how to call these more complex workflows using the vRO REST API and after a ton of trial/error and some help from Kasey Linden and one of the vRO Engineers, I now have a method in which users can follow to identify the required payload for a given vRO workflow when using the vRO REST API. The instructions below is using the latest vRO 8.0.1 release which has a new HMTL5 UI, it has been awhile and I am not sure when this new UI was introduced but the instructions may work for older clients but I would recommend standing up the latest version for developing your automation.

Step 1 - Retrieve the vRO workflow ID by selecting the workflow in the vRO UI. In the example below, my Tag a VM workflow ID is 9d95c7f5-a563-413f-af42-fd7e09275216

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