[jsmeaton]

I looked into the vSphere APIs recently and they were pretty bad. The samples were written in C# and Java, with the Java samples being fairly well written. The C# samples were terrible.

    ManagedObjectReference dcmor = cb.getServiceUtil().GetDecendentMoRef(null,"Datacenter",dcName);

There's a whole lot of ^ that all over the place. They expose very low level objects.

AFAIK there are also lots of Perl examples floating around too, which may be nicer for the traditional admin.

[alsetmusic]

Also pyvmomi (python), rbvmomi (ruby), vijava (might be what you were looking at), and the perl kit (also probably what you were looking at).

I did a project in pyvmomi and I was very impressed with its flexibility.

[jsmeaton]

Lovely, thanks for pointing that out. I'm a python person myself, so I'll definitely take a look at that. My sysadmins are still deploying servers the old fashioned way - I'd like to make their lives easier. We've automated (puppet) the configuration, but not the deployment.