VM /ETC

Archive for November, 2010

A common request since I started at Veeam Software has been for the ability to plug in Veeam’s products to vCenter and/or the vSphere Client. After all, VMware admins are used to the idea that they can go to the same interface to accomplish almost everything. VMware’s strategy to make their client expandable via a plugin architecture is brilliant, and many Technology Partners have introduced vCenter and vSphere Client plugins for their products as a result.  Veeam, for whatever reasons (maybe because the developers have been focused on new game changing features!), has not created plugins to date. However, since most of the Veeam Software suite has web pages for management interfaces already, it is very simple to create plugins yourself!

This post  provides unofficial, unsupported template files and a basic “how to” instructions for using vSphere Client plugins for the following Veeam web management interfaces:

• Veeam Backup and Replication Enterprise Management Console
• Veeam Reporter Dashboard
• Veeam Business View Dashboard

These plugins should work whether you are using any Veeam product versions or whether you have the paid or free versions of Monitor and Reporter. Bottom line: If you can make the Veeam web pages work correctly in a standard web browser on the system where you have the vSphere Client installed, then the plugins should work too.

You may have noticed that Veeam Monitor has been left out of the plugin list. That is because Monitor does not have a web interface. However, be sure to read the end of this post to see how you can use the vSphere Client from within Veeam Monitor. It’s “the photo negative” of what VMware admins are used to, but it accomplishes the same benefits.

Also understand, you can use the templates as a base for whatever web interface you want to pull into the vSphere Client.  This is not just applicable to Veeam products.

I want to credit Carter Shanklin, Eric Sloof, and Ricky El-Qasem for originally providing information about how to create web based plugins several years ago. El-Qasem even released a handy .NET tool for auto creating and registering plugins with vCenter which involved making the resulting .xml files centrally available via Tomcat from the vCenter Server. I followed the trail of crumbs from these guys.

Download the Veeam vSphere Plugin templates

Veeam vSphere Plugin Templates (551)

The rest of this post contains basic instructions, some screen shots, and a tip for making Reporter work correctly in the vSphere Client. Finally, integrating Veeam Monitor and the vSphere Client is covered briefly.

How To Modify the Templates and Instructions for Using the Plugins

The following is the contents of the README file included in the .zip

Read the rest of this entry »