vmware – Page 2

VMware 2014 Cycling Kit (10 Days left to order)

04.07.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I know a few of you were interested in the VMware 2013 Cycling Kit that I had purchased last year and have asked when the next kit would be available for purchase. Historically, this has been an internal community led project by Scott Jobe who volunteers his own time to run this program. Given the amount of interests outside of VMware, I thought I would ask Scott if it would be okay to share this externally for other fellow cycling and VMware enthusiasts.

If you are potentially interested in making a purchase, the process is broken down into two steps as listed below. Please carefully read through the FAQ before submitting an order. I would also like to reiterate that there is only 10 days left on the order. I apologize for not being able to share this sooner. I am pretty excited for this years kit as it will be VMware's first white kit ever!

Step 1 - Follow link provided and place items in your cart (Do not try to pay for them at this time). Don't forget to create an account. See FAQ for more details.

Step 2 - Once we have Step 1 complete (due by April, 16) we will briefly close the order, perform some maintenance, then re-open it so that you can pay for your items. The window for payments will be much shorter so please do this as quickly as you can after we notify you its time to pay.

You can find more details in the FAQ here VMware_Cycling_Apparel_FAQ_2014 and please make sure you read through it carefully before putting in your order.

Here is the link for the VMware 2014 Cycling Kit: https://www.lgpickpayride.com/VMware_2014_Clothing_Order

Having some fun with the Marvel Comics API & vSphere SDK for Python

02.10.2014 by William Lam // 2 Comments

As a child of the 80's, I still remember waking up super early on a Saturday morning to watch some of my favorite cartoons including Transformers, GI Joe, Ninja Turtles and many of the Marvel cartoon series. Last week I saw an interesting tweet from our former VMware CTO, Steve Herrod:

It looks like Marvel has just released a Marvel Comics REST API which allows developers to access the entire Marvel Comics Universe and build custom applications and websites with that data. So, you might be wondering what does this have to do with VMware and virtualization? Well, when I heard about this API, I knew I had to find a way to incorporate this into a cool VMware project.

I decided to create a sample vSphere SDK for Python (also known as pyvmomi) script that would allow a user to specify a number of random Marvel Characters to select from the Marvel database and then automatically create dummy VMs based on those names which could be used for testing. There were a variety of VMware SDK's (Perl, Ruby, PowerCLI, Java, etc) that I could have used, but I opted for the vSphere SDK for Python given my Python skills were not very strong. This also gave me a good reason to play around with our Python SDK.

There are a couple of things you will need to setup before you can use the sample script:

Setup a Marvel API key
Install vSphere SDK for Python, you can take a look here.
Download the create_random_marvel_vms.py

Disclaimer: There is not much error handling built into the sample script, please use at your own risk.

You will need to edit the script and replace the following two variables: marvel_public_key & marvel_private_key with the API key after creating an account on Marvel's website. One thing I really like about the Marvel API and I know many other vendors also provide this which is an interactive API tester. This allows a user to explore and execute a particular API requests without writing a single line of code to get a better understanding of the results before one starts to develop their application.

To run the script, you will need to pass in the following parameters:

--host : Name of your vCenter Server (only tested with vCenter)
--user : User to login with
--password : Password for the user
--datastore : Name of the datastore in which VMs will be created in
--count : The number of Dummy VMs to create

Here is an example of running the script:

./create_random_marvel_vms.py --host vcenter --user root --password vmware --datastore mini-local-datastore-1 --count 10

As you can see from the screenshot above I have just created 10 random VMs where each name is a random Marvel character extracted using a GET request on /v1/public/characters. If we head over to our vSphere Web Client, we should now see our 10 newly created VMs which contain 1vCPU and 128MB of memory. To keep things simple, I did not add a vDisk but you can easily tweak the dummy VM configuration based on your requirements.

Check out the new and improved VMware Developer Center!

09.23.2013 by William Lam // 2 Comments

One common piece of feedback that we have heard from customers and partners over the years is how difficult it can be to get started with using VMware's API and SDKs. The biggest challenge is not actually using the API and SDKs, but actually finding out what is available for a particular product or the solution you are trying to develop. The other challenge of course is where to download the API/SDK, language support and their corresponding documentation.

In the past, this information would be scoured throughout VMware's website and Google searches will usually lead folks to the VMware Developer Center. The site has been in need of a major revamp for awhile now and I am glad to see that VMware has taken this feedback very seriously as I have provided similar feedback when I was a customer as well as employee.

I am happy see that we have re-launched the VMware Developer Center which now contains a wealth of useful information that has never been available before! I was one of the lucky few who received early access to the new VMware Developer Center to help provide feedback on how we can better improve our user experience with the site. This will continue to be a work in progress based on on-going feedback from customers and partners.

Here are a few things worth checking out ...

Development & Certification

The first thing I think everyone will just LOVE is that VMware is now listing EVERY single API/SDK that is available which includes public API/SDKs as well as what is known as "Gated API/SDK" that usually are available to partners only. The reason this is a big deal is if you are a new partner, how do you know what is available to you and how can you add value on top of the VMware eco-system? You now can get a list of all VMware API/SDKs under the Developement & Certification section and it provides you with a high level of what each API/SDKs provides. For gated API/SDK, you will see a tiny lock symbol next to it. When you login to MyVMware and you are supposed to have access to these API/SDKs, the icons will be unlocked and you will be able to get more details including downloads and documentation. You can also filter the views by specific API/SDKs as well as scripting/programming language.

vCloud Suite Library

Earlier I mentioned that it was quite difficult for someone to figure out exactly what API/SDKs are available for a particular product, especially within the vCloud Suite. One really neat feature is under the "Library" section which provides you with a high level diagram of the VMware vCloud Suite and it is an interactive diagram which you can hover over and it provides information about each product. If you click on one of the products, it will provide more information on the API/SDKs that can be used to integrate or access that particular product. This is a great way to learn about VMware products from a scripting/programmatic perspective and we also have one for the Horizon Suite.

VMware Standards

One other cool page to visit is the "Standards" page which currently just contains the UX design standards for the vSphere Web Client. If you want to learn more about the design principles used to create the vSphere Web Client or looking to build your own vSphere Web Client plugin, you may be interested in this section. I suspect over time we will be publishing more design standards that can be shared with the general community and hopefully useful for our partners and integrators.

Be sure to explore the rest of the site, though this is only the initial release of the VMware Developer Center, if you have any feedback feel free to leave a comment either on my blog or in the VMTN community forums. I know the team responsible for the VMware Developer Center has so much more planned including more sample code for each of our API/SDK as well as more content and interactions from each of the engineering teams. So stay tuned and check back often!