At VMworld in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago Akorri demonstrated it’s support for VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC).  VIC allows third party applications to be integrated with Virtual Center. 

This is a great strategy for VMware.  I’m assuming VMware is trying to position Virtual Center as the one and only Virtual Management Application that customers will need.  By allowing ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors) to easily and seamlessly integrate with Virtual Center then customers can potentially get the functionality not directly provided by Virtual Center from ISVs while still using Virtual Center as the "single pane of glass".

The VMware team did a nice job of implementing the VIC.  If you are interested in implementing a Virtual Infrastructure Client yourself there is a VIC communities page on the VMware website that contains an SDK and some useful technical notes.  The website currently states that the SDK is "experimental" but so far we haven’t experience any major problems.

So in a nutshell here’s how it all works:

The only problem we ran into was with setting the ExtensionClientInfo and ExtensionServerInfo type.  The type must be set to com.vmware.vim.viClientScripts.  That wasn’t clear in the version of the documentation that we originally designed from.  It looks like VMware has since updated the technical note making that clear.

Please contact Akorri if you’d like to try our BalancePoint VIC yourself.