vSphere servers provide the PropertyCollector service for accessing data and monitoring changes. Use the PropertyCollector to obtain references to managed objects, to obtain values of managed object properties, and to monitor and retrieve modified property values.
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Introduction to the PropertyCollector PropertyCollector service interface provides a way to monitor and retrieve information about managed objects, such as whether a virtual machine is powered on or whether a host in a cluster is offline.vSphere Data Objects for Property Collection PropertyCollector data objects. For more detailed descriptions, see the vSphere API Reference . vSphere Methods for Property Collection PropertyCollector supports the following approaches to obtaining objects and properties from the server: Using the PropertyCollector with RetrievePropertiesEx RetrievePropertiesEx method. Two use cases are shown.Retrieve a Property from a Specified Managed Object PropertyCollector to retrieve a property from a VirtualMachine object with the RetrieveProperiesEx method. The example retrieves a managed object reference to the parent object of a VirtualMachine object in the inventory hierarchy.Retrieve Properties from a Set of Managed Objects with a View PropertyCollector with a ContainerView to retrieve properties from VirtualMachine objects with the RetrieveProperiesEx method.Simple Property Collector Program in Java for Web Services SDK Inventory Traversal Client Data Synchronization (WaitForUpdatesEx) CreateFilter and WaitForUpdatesEx methods. The WaitForUpdatesEx method supports an incremental retrieval model. Server Data Transmission RetrieveOptions.maxObjects and WaitOptions.maxObjectUpdates properties in the vSphere API Reference .PropertyCollector Performance PropertyCollector for any given session: SearchIndex SearchIndex managed object provides a set of methods to retrieve references to managed objects in the vSphere inventory. You can search by managed objects inventory path, IP address, datastore path, DNS name, and various other identifying attributes.
