Best Practices for
Deploying and Testing Your
vSphere Client
Extensions
vSphere Client
ExtensionsAfter you develop
your
vSphere Client
extension, you can follow these recommendations to ensure that your extension
is successfully deployed to the
vSphere Client
.
- To improve the performance of your plug-in package, the initial download and deployment time after the first time the user logs into thevSphere Client, must be less than a minute.
- To ease the testing and debugging of your plug-in package, you must include the build number in the dot-separated version number of the plug-in package when you register the plug-in as avSphere Clientextension.
- To prevent deployment issues when you try to deploy a new version of a registered plug-in package, make sure that you modify the version property of your plug-in package in theplugin-package.xmlmanifest file.
- To prevent deployment issues when you try to deploy a plug-in package with the same version, make sure that you unregister the plug-in package by removing the plug-in as avCenter Serverextension. You must also manually delete the cached files of the plug-in package that are stored on the Virgo server in one of the following locations:Virgo Server EnvironmentLocation of Cached PackagesvCenter Server Appliance/etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/vc-packages/vsphere-client-serenity/Windows OS local development environment%PROGRAMDATA%\VMware\vCenterServer\cfg\vsphere-client\vc-packages\vsphere-client-serenity\Mac OS local development environment/var/lib/vmware/vsphere-client/vsphere-client/vc-packages/vsphere-client-serenity/
- To avoid performance issues, make sure that your plug-in package has only one version registered with thevCenter Server. You must not change the value of thekeyproperty of thevCenter ServerExtensiondata object between releases.
- To verify easily the deployment of your plug-in package and monitor for any issues related to your plug-in, you must know how to work with the Virgo server log files. You can find these log files in one of the following locations:Log Files LocationEnvironmentVirgo Log Files LocationvSphere Clientdevelopment environment(Windows or Mac OS)html-client-sdk/vsphere-ui/server/logs/vsphere_client_virgo.logvCenter Server Appliance6.5 installationvSphere Client/var/log/vmware/vsphere-ui/logs/Thevsphere_client_virgo.logfile contains the log information that the Virgo server generates. Problems usually start with the[ERROR]tag. Use your plug-in package name or the bundle symbolic name to detect errors caused by your plug-in.
- To log information about your plug-in package, you must use the default logging mechanisms of thevSphere Client. Use the Apache Log4j logging framework to provide debugging information for your plug-in package. The Virgo server uses the Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) logging API.