User Statement:
As the user of the vic-machine-service I want to ensure efficient lookup of VIC appliance VMs on which the service runs.
Details:
In an effort to find an alternative to the CustomFieldValue approach we are using currently, we have been researching different, but efficient ways to look up VIC appliances. After some researches, we seem to have come to a workable solution that would permanently replace the existing approach.
The idea is to use vim.ExtensionManager.QueryManagedBy() which returns an array list of ManagedObjectReferences that are managed by the Extension of the provided extensionKey, in this case "com.vmware.vic". We feed the list into the vim.PropertyCollector.RetrievePropertiesEx() call to get the fields we want for consumption by UI.
For this approach, we need to set the VIC appliance VM configuration's managedBy field to a reference to the H5 Client plugin Extension that was registered with the vCenter Server. The ManagedByInfo object (ref) needs to have two fields set to correctly point to the H5 Client plugin extension - extensionKey and type, which match the key and type properties in the Extension object, respectively.
Before we set the type field, we should create and add an ExtManagedEntityInfo object to the ExtensionManager object's managedEntityInfo field (ref), which basically is a way for us to define custom-typed objects. Only the type field is mandatory and the value of it needs to be unique such as VicApplianceVM. This field will be referenced by the Extension's type field as shown below:
Extension
managedEntityInfo: [ ExtManagedEntityInfo{type: string - uniqueIdentifierForVicAppliance}, ... ]
type: String - should match managedEntityInfo.type
Next, in order to actually associate the VIC appliance VM with the H5 Client plugin Extension, the VM needs to be reconfigured such that VirtualMachineConfigInfo object's managedBy field points to the H5 Client plugin Extension:
ManagedByInfo
managedBy: ManagedByInfo{extensionKey: string - plugin extension key, type: string - value set in the managedEntityInfo field above}
Versioning
Now, as far as the versioning is concerned, we would like to ensure that each VIC appliance VM has the major, minor, patch and build number information available for consumption by UI so that we can later implement proper sorting/filtering mechanisms as necessary. An investigation into this led us to look into the VirtualMachine object's config.product field which is of type VAppProductInfo (ref). Currently the version field does show major, minor and patch info but not build number.
Caveats
There is a chicken-and-egg problem where when a VIC appliance VM is deployed with the aforementioned configs to be set, there is a good chance that the VIC UI plugin is not installed especially when this is a fresh installation. @jzt is currently looking into this issue.
Further work
This idea could be extended to improve looking up all VCHs and Container VMs in the vSphere inventory as well as to support a custom icon. This could be considered post 1.3 work.
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