vSphere SDK for Perl Programming Guide - Documentation - VMware

vSphere SDK for Perl Programming Guide
To create an enumeration data object, use a string value as the argument to the enumeration type’s constructor.
my $power_state = VirtualMachinePowerState->new('poweredOff');
Typically, enumerations are used as arguments to methods:
$vm->MigrateVM(
host => $target_host,
priority => VirtualMachineMovePriority->new('defaultPriority'),
state => VirtualMachinePowerState->new('poweredOff'),
);
Creating Data Objects with Properties
You create data objects with constructors that have names corresponding to the classes of the data objects in
the vSphere API. The constructor syntax follows common Perl conventions. The arguments supplied to the
constructor are key‐value pairs, where each key is the name of an object property, and the corresponding value
is the value with which the property is initialized.
For example, creating a virtual machine requires the creation of a data structure that includes a number of
nested data objects. One of those objects is a VirtualMachineFieldInfo data object, which can be
constructed as follows:
my $files = VirtualMachineFileInfo->new
(
logDirectory => undef,
snapshotDirectory => undef,
suspendDirectory => undef,
vmPathName => $ds_path
);
The VirtualMachineFileInfo object is then contained within a VirtualMachineConfigSpec object:
my $vm_config_spec = VirtualMachineConfigSpec->new(
name => $args{vmname},
memoryMB => $args{memory},
files => $files, # $args{num_cpus},
guestId => $args{guestid},
deviceChange => \@vm_devices
);
This code is taken from the apps/vm/vmcreate.pl utility application. See the scripts in the apps and samples
directories for examples of simple and complex uses of data objects.
To set the value of a property that is defined as an enumeration, you must pass the new value to the data object
as follows:
$ = new ('');
For example, you can change the power state as follows:
$power_state = new VirtualMachinePowerState ('poweredOff');
Understanding Operations and Methods
The vSphere SDK for Perl runtime maps server‐side operations to client‐side Perl view object methods. For
each operation defined on a server managed object, the vSphere SDK for Perl creates a corresponding view
method when it creates the view object.
30 VMware, Inc.