TABLE OF CONTENTS In an effort to give developers and administrators even more control over their Virtual Infrastructure, VMware has provided additional SDKs designed to meet specific management needs. In addition to the VMware Scripting APIs and the Virtual Infrastructure SDK, VMware also offers the VMware Guest SDK and the CIM SDK. We will review each of these SDKs briefly.
Newly introduced with Virtual Infrastructure 3 is the VMware Guest SDK or Guest API. This interface provides access to certain data for the guest operating system running inside a virtual machine. The SDK is facilitated by the VMware Tools, implying that the tools must be installed in order for your management application to be able to hook into the API. In addition, the Guest SDK is a read-only API, intended only to provision a mechanism for data collection.
Using the VMware Guest SDK, you can monitor and collect data for the statistics (shown in Table 3.19) about the virtual machine environment.
| Item | Statistic |
|---|---|
| Memory | The total amount of memory allocated to the guest OS. The amount of memory in use at the time of data collection. The upper limit of memory available to the guest OS, if not equal to the total amount of memory allocated. The number of shares allocated for memory resources. |
| CPU | The amount of CPU resources guaranteed. Minimum reserved rate that the virtual machine is allowed to run, even when idle. The number... |
