Question

I am using the vCloud Java API provided by VMWare to automate the creation of VMs in their enterprise cloud solution. I have been able to do this just fine. However I am not able to figur out to set custom properties on the VM. I have checked out the VMWare API reference and I cannot find anything which intuitively suggests how to do this. Any insight may be helpful?

Here is the code I have written till now to configure the VM and I want to add the custom property configuration to it.

private static SourcedCompositionItemParamType addVAppTemplateItem(String vAppNetwork, MsgType networkInfo, String vmHref, String ipAddress, String vmName) {
    SourcedCompositionItemParamType vappTemplateItem = new SourcedCompositionItemParamType();
    ReferenceType vappTemplateVMRef = new ReferenceType();
    vappTemplateVMRef.setHref(vmHref);
    vappTemplateVMRef.setName(vmName);
    vappTemplateItem.setSource(vappTemplateVMRef);


    NetworkConnectionSectionType networkConnectionSectionType = new NetworkConnectionSectionType();
    networkConnectionSectionType.setInfo(networkInfo);

    NetworkConnectionType networkConnectionType = new NetworkConnectionType();
    networkConnectionType.setNetwork(vAppNetwork);
    networkConnectionType.setIpAddressAllocationMode(IpAddressAllocationModeType.MANUAL.value());
    networkConnectionType.setIpAddress(ipAddress);
    networkConnectionType.setIsConnected(true);
    networkConnectionSectionType.getNetworkConnection().add(networkConnectionType);

    InstantiationParamsType vmInstantiationParamsType = new InstantiationParamsType();
    List<JAXBElement<? extends SectionType>> vmSections = vmInstantiationParamsType.getSection();
    vmSections.add(new ObjectFactory().createNetworkConnectionSection(networkConnectionSectionType));
    vappTemplateItem.setInstantiationParams(vmInstantiationParamsType);
    return vappTemplateItem;
}

Answer 1

After going through the REST API documentation I realized that you put Custom Properties into the ProductSection. Unfortunately I could not figure out a way to add a ProductSection when creating a VApp so added the ProductSection after creating the VApp by retrieving the VM and calling updateProductSections on it.

Response from VMWare community forum