More About Managed Objects

The documentation for the vSphere API and object model introduces a large number of managed objects. There are five basic types of managed objects that describe the organization of a server. Other managed objects can be considered as details expanding on these five basic types:

• Folder
• Datacenter
• ComputeResource
• ResourcePool
• VirtualMachine

It is a characteristic of all managed objects that they have a moRef to the managed object that serves as the parent to the managed object. This parent moRef allows you to reconstruct the object hierarchy exposed by the vSphere SDK. In general the hierarchy is a tree-like structure along the lines of:

Root Folder > Datacenter > ComputeResource > ResourcePool > VirtualMachine

There are variations on this theme, depending on whether you connect to vCenter or directly to an ESXi host, but the overall organization is like the structure above. Each managed object also has a Name property.

The virtual machine that you want to back up, and the snapshot you take of it (the extensible managed object VirtualMachineSnapshot) are both designated by their moRef.