VMware releases the official VirtualCenter plug-in guide

Last month, I reported that VMware was working on an “official” VMware VirtualCenter plug-in guide. And just that quickly, the company has released the guide – although only with “experimental” support. But that’s more support than they would have given the reverse-engineered guide from Andrew Kutz.

VMware writes:

With the release of VirtualCenter 2.5, VMware offers third‐party developers and partners the ability to extend the VMware Infrastructure Client (VI Client) with their own product‐specific menu selections, views, tabs, and toolbar icons, to provide access to external, Web‐based functionality. These extensions, or VI Client Plug‐ins, comprise the set of configuration files, URLs, icons, and Web‐server‐hosted resources that work together to display extended menu items, icons, and other user

interface (UI) items in the VI Client and provide access to the external functionality.

Adding a plug‐in to the VI Client is relatively simple—the only requirement for the extended functionality is that it be available from a Web server, using a standard URL that can be accessed directly from your end‐users’ desktop machines.

This technical note provides an overview of the VI Client Plug‐in architecture and helps you get started adding your own extensions to the VI Client.

The document is actually very well written, straight forward, and easy to understand. What’s interesting however is that it took someone like Andrew Kutz to make a lot of noise in order to get this document officially written and sanctioned by VMware. If Kutz never reverse-engineered VirtualCenter plug-in creations and never wrote a step-by-step guide of his own, would VMware have stepped up and published this document? Who knows. But we’re all here now, so hopefully individuals and 3rd-party companies will be able to make the most of it.

So what happens to Kutz and his viplugins.com Web site? Does VMware’s document trump his? And what about his selection of plug-ins available for download? I asked Kutz that very question, and he said that VMware’s announcement hasn’t slowed down his site traffic. In fact, it was just the opposite. His Web site traffic has increased because of the awareness that VMware has brought to his plug-ins.

So both documents have been well received by the public. One is unsupported, and the other is experimental. Off to a good start here. In a recent blog post on SearchVMware.com, Kutz offers a number of other differences between his process and VMware’s. Here, he describes one such difference:

Official plug-ins function very similarly to mine (they should, they are built using the same principals), but they could be considered inferior in one very important manner. Although the user interface to activate a plug-in is the same (context menus, tabs, menu items), the interface for official plug-ins can only be a web page. For instance, a user right-clicks on a virtual machine and clicks on the context-menu item labeled Migrate storage which launches my Storage VMotion plug-in rewritten as an official plug-in. Instead of having a Windows form appear that maintains a consistent user interface, instead a web browser appears and runs a script or web application that has authentication information and object information passed to it from the VI client (much like my Invoke plug-in).

If you think you’re ready to create your own VirtualCenter plug-in, you might want to check out VMware’s official “Getting Started with VI Client Plug-ins”. At 13 pages, it is a quick and easy read, and it will easily get you started down the road of plug-in creation success.

I wouldn’t doubt if we see VMware create their own “marketplace” for VirtualCenter plug-ins, much like they did with their very successful Virtual Appliance Marketplace.