In the data returned from PropertyCollector, you can find most of the information that is useful for backup in the Virtual Machine managed object, including the following:

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Virtual Disks – names, types, and capacities.

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Virtual Machine Type and Configuration – Whatever would be useful in (re)creating a virtual machine. This list might include such information as memory size and number of CPUs.

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Display Names – These names appear in VMware products such as the vSphere Client. You should keep track of these names and correlate them for consistency between your product and VMware products.

VMware supports many virtual disk implementations. The disk implementation type is important because:

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On restore, you should re-create virtual disk with the same disk type as the original virtual machine used.

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A disk backed by a pass-through raw device mapping (RDM) mostly bypasses the ESXi storage stack. You cannot make a snapshot of this virtual disk type. Therefore, you cannot back up pass-through RDM disk using the snapshot method described in this document.

For more information about the Java APIs, read the first several chapters of the VMware vSphere Web Services SDK Programming Guide, and related pages of the Web-based VMware vSphere API Reference Documentation. Both are available at http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk. Examples in this chapter assume that you have set up the vSphere SDK as described in documentation.