vSphere Tagging feature — identify uplink port in dSwitch

Recently I faced a weird issue in our product Nimesa, our QA Director raised a bug Nimesa lists two networks during clone but while editing the VM in vSphere web client he was getting only one network option

When I checked in the vSphere web client I can see one network as Uplink port group but in the manage object browser two networks are listed and there is no difference between them to identify that as an uplink port group and ignore while listing in the clone

after scratching my head and wondered “ But how does the vSphere web client know one is used for uplink and the other not? “ finally found a solution

There is the concept of Tagging (an invisible feature )

As you can see in the above screenshot two sub-nodes under the distributed vswitch. Internally, these two sub-nodes are all represented by the same DistributedVirtualPortgroup type but their icons are different because their usages are different.

The second one with the NIC card symbol is having a tag Tag[] “SYSTEM/DVS.UPLINKPG”

The tag property is defined with ManagedEntity property, therefore, you can add and view tags to anything you see in the inventory tree: host, virtual machine, etc.

Other scenarios where I found tagging are, If you have a Virtual Machine that is a View Replica/Linked Clone in Horizon view, you may see these tags associated with the VM:

SYSTEM/COM.VMWARE.SIM.SVIMANAGEDOBJECT
SYSTEM/COM.VMWARE.VIM.SVIMANAGEDOBJECT

This tag helps me to fix that bug.

Ref: William Lam published a great post on changing tags with MOB.

Originally published at asvignesh.