Understanding vCloud statueses

Question

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the statuses that vCloud returns in their SDK, but there seems to be very light documentation on them. A few of them I don't understand what they're about, and in practice I'm only seeing POWERED_ON, POWERED_OFF, and SUSPENDED. The only documentation on the statuses that I can find are here:

http://www.vmware.com/support/vcd/doc/rest-api-doc-1.5-html/operations/GET-VApp.html

What confuses me are things like "what is an 'entity'? And what does it mean when it's 'resolved'?" When I go to provision a VM and monitor its state, it starts at POWERED_OFF and goes to POWERED_ON, when I would expect to see some intermediary statuses while it's in the process of provisioning. Does anyone know where I can go to find out more about this?

Answer 1

This page from the vCD 5.1 documentation shows the possible values of the status field for various entities. The current doc uses numerical values but the API also has a few spots where string values are returned instead. The reference you found from the 1.5 API includes some of them; I think as part of the 5.1 doc update the string values were dropped from the schema reference.

An entity in the vCloud API is very similar to the likewise-named notion in database modeling. Wikipedia provides a fair definition of the term from entity-relationship modeling:

An entity may be defined as a thing which is recognized as being capable of an independent existence and which can be uniquely identified.

The RESOLVED (numerical value 1) state means that most of the parts of the entity are present, but it isn't fully constructed yet. You typically see it when uploading an OVF and all of the bits have be transferred to vCD but stuff is still happening in the background prior to it being usable.