There's a 250+ page PDF "Programming Guide" for the vSphere SDK, on top of almost every Object/Type/Fault/Method etc documented, and a built-in API/object brows

There's a 250+ page PDF "Programming Guide" for the vSphere SDK, on top of almost every Object/Type/Fault/Method etc documented, and a built-in API/object browser. What more do you want? There are community samples for pyvmomi, multiple blogs explaining common use cases etc. But yes, sometimes it's quicker/easier to create thing in the UI and read back the values. Maybe my standards are low. EDIT: I also don't understand your "string oriented" comment. Do you mean the object IDs (MOIDs/morefs)? In pyvmomi you can do this: vm = vim.VirtualMachine("vm-1297") vm._stub = service_instance._stub You now have a VM object, not a string. vm.RebootGuest() etc (yes you need some helper methods to lookup things by name etc, but various things by name are not unique)