So, its not clear from this posting whether VMware's "Code Central" was announced or escaped but this looks to be a very valuable repository for sharing vSphere scripts.

I'm a recent convert to the wonders of creating new capabilities through the vSphere SDK. Our team has been using it to prototype some interesting new usages for power aware virtualization that we hope eventually will find their way into the VMWare Distributed Power Management (DPM) tool.

The most interesting usage is what we call "platooning" where different server resource pools are kept in different power states from fully powered on through power capped to standby and full off. Servers are moved from one platoon to the next (and workloads are migrated onto them) based on a set of policies for required application capacity headroom and power on latency as load increases. Our belief is that, by carefully designing these policies, we'll be able to save significant power across the data center without impacting peak throughput or response time of any of the applications.

Unfortunately, we don't have the data to demonstrate this savings yet. That's where the SDK comes in. We're able to prototype the usage, collect the data, validate the feasibilty and, if it never shows up in DPM, still be able to implement it in production.

We're just coming up to speed on the SDK, having completed our first "Hello World" integration with it but we think its going to be a very valuable tool for experimenting and going to production with many new usages. I'm hoping Code Central provides a good source of examples to help bootstrap our development.