Overview

The VMware vSphere Automation SDKs provide support for your client application infrastructure with services to perform management operations in your vSphere environment. The vSphere Automation SDK for REST also contains samples to demonstrate how to use the new APIs.

The version 6.7 SDK enables programmatic access to the following services:

Service discovery (Lookup Service)
Authentication (Single Sign-On)
Session management
Tagging
Content Library
Virtual Machines
vCenter Server Appliance management
vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller appliance deployment

Note: Single Sign-On authentication is available through the VMware vCenter Single Sign-On API and the vSphere API. Service discovery is available through the Lookup Service API. This feature can be accessed using the SOAP API mechanism shown in the SDK samples.

Distribution Kit

You can clone and download the vSphere Automation SDK for REST distribution kit from the https://github.com/vmware/vsphere-automation-sdk-rest .

What's New

The vSphere Automation SDKs for vSphere 6.7 includes new APIs for:

Storage Policy
Guest Ops
vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller appliance deployment

For information about the new APIs and samples, see the vSphere Automation repositories at GitHub.

Caveats and Limitations

The vcenter API includes the following methods that have known issues and might be removed in a future version. It is advised that these APIs are not invoked:

DeploymentType.reconfigure
PscRegistration.repoint
Upgrade.cancel
Deployment.rollback

Known Issues

Unauthenticated exception following long-running operation
After an API client completes a long-running operation, such as an upload to the content library, the next operation might fail with an "Unauthenticated exception" message. This happens if the long running operation did not complete within the lifetime of the authentication session.

Workarounds:
- Keep the session alive by issuing short operations on another thread until the long running operation completes.
- Increase the session length using the VMware vSphere Web Client. Select Administration > System Configuration > Services > vAPI Endpoint > Manage> General, and increase the value for the Maximum session idle time.
API Explorer does not work with the Internet Explorer browser
The API Explorer does not load properly in Internet Explorer 11. The browser displays a blank page.

Workaround:

Use a different browser, such as Firefox, Chrome, or Edge.
API Explorer unsupported operations
The "Try it Out" feature in the API Explorer is not supported for some operations.

When you try the following operations in API Explorer, they yield error messages:
- https://vcip/rest/com/vmware/vcenter/inventory/datastore?~action=find
- https://vcip/rest/com/vmware/vcenter/inventory/network?~action=find
- https://vcip/rest/com/vmware/vcenter/ovf/import-flag
Enabling certificate validation
The samples in the vSphere Automation SDK for REST do not enable certificate validation for service endpoints by default. To enable certificate validation, modify the code that sets request options. Where the flag rejectUnauthorized is set to false in the samples, set the value to true instead.

If the service endpoint uses an untrusted certificate, you have two ways to use it in the client:
- Download the certificate authority's root certificate, using a Web browser connected to the service endpoint, and import it into your client machine certificate store.
- Modify the sample code to specify a certificate file in the request options.
The following code extract shows the second way:

function makeAuthRequestOptions(ssoConnectionInfo, requestXml) {

   return {

      host: ssoConnectionInfo.host,

      path: ssoConnectionInfo.path || '/sts/STSService/vsphere.local',

      port: ssoConnectionInfo.port || 443,

      method: 'POST',

      rejectUnauthorized: true, // was: false to ignore server SSL validation.

      ca: fs.readFileSync('/path/to/downloaded/root.cer'), // VMCA root certificate from PSC

      requestCert: true,

      agent: false,

      headers: {

         'Content-type': 'text/xml; charset="UTF-8"',

         'Content-length': requestXml.length,

         'User-Agent': 'VMware/jsSample',

         'Connection': 'keep-alive',

         'SOAPAction': "http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-trust/200512/RST/Issue"

      }

   }

}