Overview

VMware VMotion technology moves an entire running VM instantaneously from one server to another. The VMware vCenter Server exposes a management interface that can be used by DFM to:

  • Connect to vCenter Server using the VIM protocol, to discover its topology (Datacenters, Clusters, ESX Servers, Resource Pools, Virtual Machines, and so on).

  • Connect to ESX Server and discover its full topology. This discovery is limited to the server itself.

  • Listen for events that occur in the inventory structure. Currently two types of events are tracked and reported:

    • VMotion events, when the VM migrates from server to server.

    • VM powering-on event, when the VM is turned on.

VMware provides an SDK describing this interface, which includes documentation, API reference, libraries, and examples. VMware Infrastructure SDK can be downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/.