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From: mfojtik@redhat.com
To: deltacloud-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Initial vSphere support
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:42:07 +0200
Message-Id: <1308051728-4074-1-git-send-email-mfojtik@redhat.com>

Hi,

This is an initial draft of VMWare vSphere driver for Deltacloud API.
I spend a lot of time debugging issues with 'spherical' gem and after
some time I gave up (eg. I was not able to call PowerOnVM_Task, etc..).
Then I found a gem called 'rbvmomi'[1] developed by regular VMWare employee.
This gem was claimed to work 'only' with 1.9 but it works nice on my
1.8.7 installation.

List of supported things:

 - Hardware profiles (there are 4 predefined: small, medium, large and x-large)
   Also there is a 'unknown' profile for VM's launched manually using vSphere GUI.
 - Listing of images (will list VMs marked as 'template')
 - Get single image (it's fast, since I'm using find_vm instead of filtering
   whole collection)
 - Listing of instances
 - Get single instance (same as above)
 - Instance operations: start, stop, destroy and reboot are working
   flawlessly
 - Create instance is working from predefined template. You can specify
   a hardware profile and name, which will be used then as an 'id'.
   Mostly because find_vm() method search for an instance name instead of
   uuid.

List of unsupported/not-working things:

 - Instance has *no* image information, because it's imposible to get
   information about whot template was used to 'deploy' virtual machine.
   If it's a problem, it can be solved by YAML/JSON local mapping, but I would
   rather avoid this.

 - Create instance is 'slow' (mean it takes like 50 seconds to launch a new
   instance. Again this could be solved using some local mapper, but fist I want
   to know if it's necessary or not.

How to use this driver:

 - You will need vSphere installed and SOAP API enabled on some URL.
 - Then:
   API_PROVIDER="vsphere.provider.com" ./bin/deltacloudd -i vsphere
   NOTE: 'http' and 'sdk' are not needed in PROVIDER

All other things should work as ussual.

 -- Michal

[1] https://github.com/rlane/rbvmomi (look to examples directory)