In the first part, we’ve seen how to get general information about the ESX hosts.

In this part, we’ll read some information about the virtual machines running on a given host.

VirtualMachines like almost everything in ESX are managed entities. So you can query them using InventoryNavigator.searchManagedEntities:

ServiceInstance si = new ServiceInstance(new URL(url), USER_NAME, PASSWORD, true);
HostSystem host = (HostSystem) new InventoryNavigator(si.getRootFolder()).searchManagedEntity("HostSystem", HOSTNAME);
ManagedEntity[] managedEntities = new InventoryNavigator(host).searchManagedEntities("VirtualMachine");

Note: if you use si.getRootFolder() instead of host you will get all VMs running on all hosts managed by your ESX infrastructure.

Once you have a virtual machine, you can get the virtual machine configuration information using:

VirtualMachineConfigInfo config = vm.getConfig();

And from this VirtualMachineConfigInfo you can get data related to the configured virtual hardware:

private static void writeVmInfo(VirtualMachine vm) {
	System.out.println("Virtual Machine:" + vm.getName());
	VirtualMachineConfigInfo config = vm.getConfig();
	VirtualHardware hw = config.getHardware();
	System.out.println("Memory in MB: " + hw.getMemoryMB());
	System.out.println("# of CPUs: " + hw.getNumCPU());
	VirtualDevice[] devices = hw.getDevice();
	for (int i = 0; i < devices.length; i++) {
		VirtualDevice device = devices[i];
		Description deviceInfo = device.getDeviceInfo();
		System.out.println("Device (" + device.getKey() + "): " + deviceInfo.getLabel() + " : " + deviceInfo.getSummary());
	}
}

The virtual machine configuration information contains more than just the virtual hardware configuration:

• Affinity settings for CPU and memory
• Resource limits for CPU and memory
• Datastores
• And more…

Here the full code of our example class:

package com.benohead.esx;

import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.rmi.RemoteException;

import com.vmware.vim25.Description;
import com.vmware.vim25.InvalidProperty;
import com.vmware.vim25.RuntimeFault;
import com.vmware.vim25.VirtualDevice;
import com.vmware.vim25.VirtualHardware;
import com.vmware.vim25.VirtualMachineConfigInfo;
import com.vmware.vim25.mo.HostSystem;
import com.vmware.vim25.mo.InventoryNavigator;
import com.vmware.vim25.mo.ManagedEntity;
import com.vmware.vim25.mo.ServiceInstance;
import com.vmware.vim25.mo.VirtualMachine;

public class ListVms {
	static final String SERVER_NAME = "192.168.190.87";
	static final String USER_NAME = "Administrator";
	static final String PASSWORD = "xxxxxx";
	private static final String HOSTNAME = "192.168.190.34";

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		String url = "https://" + SERVER_NAME + "/sdk/vimService";
		// List host systems
		try {
			ServiceInstance si = new ServiceInstance(new URL(url), USER_NAME, PASSWORD, true);
			HostSystem host = (HostSystem) new InventoryNavigator(si.getRootFolder()).searchManagedEntity("HostSystem", HOSTNAME);
			ManagedEntity[] managedEntities = new InventoryNavigator(host).searchManagedEntities("VirtualMachine");
			for (int i = 0; i < managedEntities.length; i++) {
				VirtualMachine vm = (VirtualMachine) managedEntities[i];
				writeVmInfo(vm);
				System.out.println();
			}
			si.getServerConnection().logout();
		} catch (InvalidProperty e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (RuntimeFault e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (RemoteException e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}

	private static void writeVmInfo(VirtualMachine vm) {
		System.out.println("Virtual Machine:" + vm.getName());
		VirtualMachineConfigInfo config = vm.getConfig();
		VirtualHardware hw = config.getHardware();
		System.out.println("Memory in MB: " + hw.getMemoryMB());
		System.out.println("# of CPUs: " + hw.getNumCPU());
		VirtualDevice[] devices = hw.getDevice();
		for (int i = 0; i < devices.length; i++) {
			VirtualDevice device = devices[i];
			Description deviceInfo = device.getDeviceInfo();
			System.out.println("Device (" + device.getKey() + "): " + deviceInfo.getLabel() + " : " + deviceInfo.getSummary());
		}
	}
}