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:
    Table 1. 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.