Authenticating Against ESX Agent Manager

vCenter Server handles the authentication of ESX Agent Manager clients, so a solution must first log in to vCenter Server before it can call the methods of the ESX Agent Manager API.

ESX Agent Manager registers itself with the vCenter Server reverse proxy in the eam namespace. You find the ESX Agent Manager API under eam/sdk. You must direct all ESX Agent Manager API calls in your solution to vcenter_server_ip_address/eam/sdk.

ESX Agent Manager grants access to clients that are also clients of the vCenter Server instance in which ESX Agent Manager is an extension. All vCenter Server extensions that have an active vCenter Server session have access to ESX Agent Manager. These extensions can create ESX agencies and monitor existing ESX agencies in ESX Agent Manager. The user name that the extension provides is the extension key that the extension sets in the vCenter ServerExtensionManager instance.

Users can access the ESX Agent Manager user interface only if they have the Eam.View and Eam.Modify privileges. Solutions by definition have all vCenter Server privileges, but the Eam.View and Eam.Modify privileges limit what users can do in the vSphere Client.

Table 1. ESX Agent Manager Privileges

Privilege	Permitted Actions
Eam.View	Users can monitor all running ESX agencies in ESX Agent Manager.
Eam.Modify	Users can modify the ESX agencies, for example by powering off ESX agent virtual machines.

When you make an HTTP request to call an object in the ESX Agent Manager API for the first time, you must set the VMware SOAP session cookie. You set it to the value of the VMware SOAP session cookie of the vCenter Server HTTP connection. You must add a function in your solution to obtain the SOAP session cookie from vCenter Server when the solution establishes the connection to vCenter Serverr. The cookie remains set for the duration of the ESX Agent Manager session.