The Lookup Service maintains a registration list of vSphere services. You can use the Lookup Service to retrieve registration information for any service by setting a registration filter that you pass to the List() function on the Lookup Service. The functions and objects that you can use with the Lookup Service are defined in the lookup.wsdl file that is part of the SDK.

Lookup Service Registration Filters

You can query for service endpoints through a service registration object that you obtain from the Lookup Service. You invoke the List() function on the Lookup Service to list the endpoints that you need by passing LookupServiceRegistrationFilter. LookupServiceRegistrationFilter identifies the service and the endpoint type that you can retrieve.

Optionally, you can include the node ID parameter in the filter to identify the vCenter Server instance where the endpoint is hosted. When the node ID is omitted, the List() function returns the set of endpoint URLs for all instances of the service that are hosted on different vCenter Server instances in the environment.

For example, a LookupServiceRegistrationFilter for querying the vSphere Automation service has these service endpoint elements.

Table 1. Service Registration Filter Parameters
Filter Types Value Description
LookupServiceRegistrationServiceType product= "com.vmware.cis" vSphere Automation namespace.
type="cs.vapi" Identifies the vSphere Automation service.
LookupServiceRegistrationEndpointType type="com.vmware.vapi.endpoint" Specifies the endpoint path for the service.
protocol= "vapi.json.https.public" Identifies the protocol that will be used for communication with the endpoint .

For information about the filter parameter of the available predefined service endpoints, see Filter Parameters for Predefined Service Endpoints.