The vCloud Suite Tagging Service supports the definition of tags that you can associate with vSphere objects or vCloud Suite resources. vSphere has a tagging feature but no public API to manage tags. With the vCloud Suite SDK, you can manage tags programmatically.

For example, to tag your VMs by guest operating system type, you might create a category called operating system, and specify that it applies to VMs only. You might also specify that only a single tag can be applied to a VM at any time. The tags in this category might be Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

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Creating Tags

When you create a tag, you create a tag category and create a tag under the category. After you create the tag, you can associate the tag with an object.

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Creating Tag Associations

After you create a tag category and create a tag within the category, you can associate the tag with a vSphere managed object or a vCloud Suite resource. An association is a simple link that contains no data of its own. You can enumerate objects that are attached to a tag or tags that are attached to an object.

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Updating a Tag

To update a tag, you must create an update spec for the tag. In the update spec, you set values for the fields to be changed, and omit values for the other fields. When you do an update operation using the update spec, only the fields that contain values are changed.