By: Kristopher Bash

Kristopher Bash — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:35:40 +0000

Thanks. Unfortunately I haven’t done much more with this recently, as I am trying to completely rework a set of SNMP MP’s first. What I am hoping to do with the VMWare API is to take a development shortcut and not actually invoke the API through the SOAP web service, but rather utilize the PowerCLI powershell interface on an agent to connect to a VC server in order to extract inventory and performance data for the whole environment on a scheduled basis. The scripts to do this would export all the collected data to XML files, which would then be used as inputs for discoveries, monitors, and rules.

I’ve done some proof of concept work with this and it seems viable, but the PowerCLI scripts have to be written carefully to make sure they can execute in a reasonably short time, even in a large environment. While even in the best case, interfacing with VI with PowerCLI is too slow for near-real time monitoring, I think the benefit would be that data for all objects could be collected in one workflow, minimizing the actual overhead of interfacing with the API through bulk collection. If a Host and Guest performance snapshot were collected in one scheduled process every 5 minutes, and then other workflows utilized this collected data for performance mapping and monitoring, it would be functionally equivalent to polling the API for each individual object every 5 minutes, with less actual object instantiation and API interfacing.

If this doesn’t prove to be viable, there’s always the option of engaging the API through the SOAP web service.

By: Dan Nichols

Dan Nichols — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:37:49 +0000

Hi Kris,

Looking forward to hearing more about your work with the VMware API.

Comments on: SCOM: Building on the Net-SNMP MPs

By: Kristopher Bash

By: Dan Nichols