Appendix A: API Calls for VMware Inventory Collection

The stand-alone VMware inventory agent connects to the VMware SDK URL (https://<servername>/sdk) on each target VMware server. This connection requires an account with read access to the SDK URL. Once a connection is established with the target VMware server, the agent makes the following API calls through the SDK:

API name

Description

GetServiceContent

A single call is made to this API to retrieve the ServiceInstance to enable further queries.

RetrieveProperties: Host Information

A single call is made against the root folder to return information about each host server with the following attributes:

• ComputeResource.host
• ClusterComputeResource.host
• Datacenter.hostFolder
• Datacenter.vmFolder
• Folder.childEntity

RetrieveProperties: VM Information

A call is made against each returned HostSystem to obtain the following attributes for each virtual machine that exists on the host:

• HostSystem.parent
• ComputeResource.resourcePool
• ResourcePool.resourcePool
• ResourcePool.vm