The Guest SDK includes components for different use cases of managing guest operating systems in virtual machines.
- The Guest API provides C/C++ language functions to monitor virtual machine statistics. Management agents running in a virtual machine's guest OS can use this data and react to changes in the application layer.
- The guest statistics fetch facility returns detailed data in several structured formats about virtual machines running on an ESXi host.
- New in vSphere 8.0, the DataSets API can manipulate VM-related key-value entries using vSphere Automation from vCenter Server, or with VM Tools inside a guest OS.
- The vSphere High Availability (HA) feature for ESXi hosts in a cluster provides protection for a guest OS and applications running in a virtual machine by restarting the virtual machine if a failure occurs.
The tarball SDK download is for Linux, while the Zip download is for Windows.