Mike Preston has a short post & video about the tag features in VMware vSphere 5.1:
Just think, say you have hundreds, or thousands of VMs. You can now more align the way you categorize things inside of your business within vCenter, and sort/search on those custom tags.
From the moment I saw the tag features I’ve been pretty optimistic about them. They’d be useful for tagging VMs with all sorts of information, like billing, locations, tiering, or even as a makeshift CMDB by tagging admins, applications, etc. It also wouldn’t surprise me if they were eventually used to drive features like various storage and network profiles, replication, etc. Just set the right tag and everything just takes care of itself.
The problem right now is that there aren’t any programmatic interfaces for the tags. It’s just the GUI, which is impractical for any sort of serious use. This seems like a serious oversight, and I’m hoping that VMware will add Perl SDK and PowerCLI access as part of an update release, rather than waiting for a new version.
VMware: since I’m customer you can consider this a feature request. I’m not going to submit it to the black hole that is the normal feature request submission process… I feel you can ignore my request properly without further work on my part. :)