Best Practices for Deploying and Testing Your
vSphere Client
Extensions

After 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 the
    vSphere 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 a
    vSphere Client
    extension.
  • 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 the
    plugin-package.xml
    manifest 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 a
    vCenter Server
    extension. 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 Environment
    Location of Cached Packages
    vCenter 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 the
    vCenter Server
    . You must not change the value of the
    key
    property of the
    vCenter Server
    Extension
    data 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 Location
    Environment
    Virgo Log Files Location
    vSphere Client
    development environment
    (Windows or Mac OS)
    html-client-sdk/vsphere-ui/server/logs/vsphere_client_virgo.log
    vCenter Server Appliance
    6.5 installation
    vSphere Client
    /var/log/vmware/vsphere-ui/logs/
    The
    vsphere_client_virgo.log
    file 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 the
    vSphere 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.