I have been doing .vbs (adsi/wmi) scripting for years and now want to get into VMware coding via the VMware APIs & DLLs.
The I saw Eric Sloof's VS 2010 VB project using dll, for his VMclient (ie easy remote console) applcation. But, I have no idea where he got these DLLs from, or how they are used. This can be dowloaded at http://vmclient.nl/ (right most is a 2010 project, inside there you can find the folowing DLLs:
Interop.VMwareRemoteConsoleTypeLib.dll
AxInterop.VMwareRemoteConsoleTypeLib.dll
VimService2005.dll
I have seen the homebrew dll wrappers which look like the conenct to the VC web service via SOAP. As it seems the VMware API only works w/ Java and C#. It seems use some older Vmwre dlls so Richard Garsthagen wrote a wapper, which seems to give full serialize support to the SOAP agent on the VC server. Eric Sloof r'cmd grabbing and using the DLLs from http://www.run-virtual.com/?page_id=173 when I browse the DLL in Visual Studio i see tons and tons of stuff (fun!) but it seems so complex. The .pdf that pointed me to this is also by Eric Sloof and is here: http://www.ntpro.nl/VMwareVBApp.pdf
IN addition, I have seen the VMware published DLL in (VIX API bet 1.10 -- http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api// ) from VMware but only lets you hook and do stuff on a VM. It appear to let you do stuff on the host or cluster level. Is thie correct it only lets you do stuff on the VM and not the host/cluster? Using this API Eric Sloof shows how to connect, power on/off a VM, and move files a VM it w/o the NIC in this example. His video is here: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/categories/22-Products Sickly, I screen shot his video and typed in ALL the code (yeah a bit like the C64 days) and am playing this this code sample. If he agrees, I can post his source code.
Can anybody shed some light on this? Is VMware working on like a "gold ticket API" which we can hook and do everything (connect to VM consoles, move file to/from VMs, Automate VirutalCenter,etc etc) ? I do perfer to use VB .net (due to my .vbs scripting background). This is very confusing to a new coder and there seems to be a ton of DLLs all over the place and I am not sure where they came from.
Thanks.