Book Image

VMware vCloud Director Cookbook

By : Daniel Langenhan
Book Image

VMware vCloud Director Cookbook

By: Daniel Langenhan

Overview of this book

VMware vCloud Director is an enterprise software solution that enables the building of secure, private clouds by pooling together infrastructure resources into virtual data centers. The tool enables self-service via a web interface to reduce the management overhead and offers amazing possibilities for production and development environments. Thus, the tool will ensure efficient management of resources with data center efficiency and business agility. "VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook" will cover a lot of ground, ranging from easy to complex recipes. It will not only dive into networks, data-stores, and vApps, but also cover vCloud design improvements, troubleshooting, and the vCloud API. "VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook" is split into different sections, each of which deals with a special topic in vCloud - from networks, to vApps, to storage and design. This book contains over 80 recipes with the difficulty levels ranging from simple to very advanced. You will learn how to automate vCloud easily and quickly with the API, and also learn how to isolate a vApp and still fully access it without risking the network. Design considerations that need to be addressed while deploying the vCloud and more will also be looked into. "VMWare VCloud Director Cookbook" will make your life as an admin a lot easier by providing you with some good recipes that have been proven to work in small to large enterprises.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
VMware vCloud Director Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Appendix
Index

Accessing REST with Firefox


We will now access vCloud using REST directly as explained in the following sections.

Getting ready

Please note that the vApp template we will be using should have a network attached.

We first need to download and install a REST client we can play with. I prefer the Firefox plugin, which you can download from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restclient/.

After downloading and installing the client, we are ready to go.

How to do it...

We will now use the REST API to work with vCloud.

The first connection

  1. Open Firefox and go to the Add On RESTClient.

  2. Click on Authentication and select Basic Authentication.

  3. Enter your vCloud username and password. The username should be in the format myuser@System, to make sure you authenticate to the System organization of vCloud. You may also want to check the Remember me box.

  4. Click on Headers and select Custom Header.

  5. Enter Accept under Name and application/*+xml;version=5.1 under Value. Check Save to favorite as we need this...