Customer Reviews

VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're unlucky enough to be tasked with consuming the Vsphere API, you'll need something other than the useless documentation available from Vmware. You'll definitely want to use vijava as well, unless you like to write lots of spaghetti code. If you're a java programmer maybe you do like to write lots of ugly code; however, if you have a deadline and want to keep your sanity, vijava is the way to go.

Okay... I'm a hater. I hate the Vsphere API; I hate bloat; I think java is so 1995; I also hate Vmware's expensive, confusing and seemingly endless product line of poorly integrated, half-working garbage and useless documentation. I think the vmware documentation team gets paid by the word or page and not by the usefulness of their docs.

So, the book... I'll be fair about it. Like many of you, I have a library full of technical books.

This book is plagued with page after page of java code examples. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate examples, but c'mon.... ten pages in a row of nothing but code??? Have a Kindle? Forget about it! You won't be able to read this book with it. I also feel like there is still much missing. Want to deploy an OVF with the API? Good luck, buddy. Look elsewhere. I also want to deduct points for being too java-centric. We're consuming an API. APIs should be language agnostic. Granted, the author is a very smart guy and vijava is a life saver (you're still stuck with java). If the book was only about vijava, I suppose I could go easier on the rating; however, it's not.

I'm giving the book two stars. It's irritating that I have to buy this book to make up for the lack of useful documentation from vmware. It's also irritating that the API is so horrible that Steve had to create vijava. It's even more irritating that code examples are somehow supposed to make up for writing.

Get with it, vmware. It's not 1995 and APIs are not about java. There are at least five other very popular, modern programming languages that require much less code to accomplish the same thing.

This book differs from other recent texts on VMware, like VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration. Those are for sysadmins, and they explain how to manually use GUIs provided by VMware to run their programs.

The current book is directed at a programmer, who presumably also has sysadmin duties or who needs to make custom tools for a sysadmin. Here there are no cute screen shots of GUI panels made by others. Instead, you should be an experienced java programmer. VMware has put together an extensive library of java classes, that tie into their firmware. The text takes you in detail through sample code that uses these classes.

Though the book makes no mention of this, you can use the classes to write higher level driver code that is in the spirit of a JMX or Service Oriented Architecture approach. Perhaps these latter methods were never proffered for virtual machines. But they describe loosely coupled management viewpoints that might be well suited to the code in this book.

If like me you are tired of using vSphere or VI 2.5 official SDK, this book is for you.

Steve Jin has done a great job simplifying SDK access and improving performance drastically.
After using his VI Java API described in this book, you will no longer return to official VI Java SDK or other VI Toolkit.

You can code in Java but also in Python using Jython or IronPython.
We've choosed Jython and coupled it with some great web frameworks in python like Django. We've built a powerful web app exposing a RESTful API.

Add to this a real talent in popularizing VI objects in the SDK, this book saved me lots of time.

I have been developing software solutions for VMware vSphere environment for the past 3 years. I found this book extremely useful. It gives me concise but extremely insightful ideas about vSphere APIs.

Having used both VI SDK and the author's VI Java SDK, I can responsibly say that if you are developing solutions using Java, I simply don't see any reason why you wouldn't use the author's VI Java SDK in favor of VI SDK. In you are going to use VI Java SDK, then this book is your bible. Even if you don't use VI Java SDK, the type of insightful explanations about vSphere API is something you won't find anywhere else.

The advantages of using the author's VI Java SDK are obvious and proven. I'm making an incomplete list here:

- intuitively easy to use, and the books gives you many highly relevant samples
- high performance
- small footprint
- robust and reliable code
- extra features such as property caching

5-star is my score for the book!

VMware is certainly the market leader (some estimates say 80+% of the market) in the virtualization software marketplace which creates an environment where the machine appears to be a dedicated PC to more than one user at a time. The author of this book is a senior member of technical staff at VMware, where he provides guidance to strategic partners, such as IBM, HP, Dell, NetApp, and BEA, who build applications using VI (vSphere) SDK.

He has aimed this book at people who actually want to use VMware software. This includes system administrators, software architects, engineers and solution developers, researchers -- in essence people who really want to see how to use VMware. It begins with a basic introduction to virtualization. From there it goes into the various VMware products and the basic concepts of the SDK and then into great detail on what you can do to/with the various modules.

The book is clearly written and goes into great detail on basically every aspect of VMware.

Any advanced computer collection strong in networking and virtualization needs Vmware VI and vSphere 50K. It tells how the VI 50K fits into a Cloud Ready vSphere environment, discusses the basics of configurations and moving VMs across different platforms without disruption, and tells how to avoid common pitfalls that Vmware VI developers face. Advanced computer libraries will find this a 'must have'.