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gravyface
Asked: 2010-10-12 11:22:16 +0800 CST

Create a Guest Virtual Machine from command line in VMWare ESXi/vSphere 4?

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Finding I have access to a Windows machine less and less these days and am a bit frustrated by the lack of a Virtual Infrastructure Client for Mac or Linux. I have SSH setup on my ESXi hosts and have dug around a bit but haven't seen any method of creating virtual machines from within the "unsupported" shell.

Anybody know of an NIX friendly methods of managing ESXi (3.x) or vSphere 4? I'd be willing to upgrade if there was a noticeable gain in remote/NIX-based management.

DISCLAIMER:

Yes, I'm aware that the "unsupported" mode is, well, unsupported, but this is a lab ESXi host; there's no production VMs running on it.

linux mac-osx command-line-interface vmware-esxi

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    you should use VMware SDK or API calls instead. Look at vmcreate.pl that comes with vSphere SDK for Perl.

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  2. Assuming that you are talking about stand alone ESXi hosts the now fully supported SSH capability is your best bet and the set of available console commands has improved with V4.1.

    For environments without vCenter involved full remote management functionality only works in read only mode - that pretty much rules out active management using the Perl Remote CLI, the Windows only PowerCLI and the use of the pre-packaged VMware Management Appliance that includes a full set of remote CLI tools in a CentOS VM.

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  3. PowerCLI is going to be much easier to learn than doing it via ESXi unsupported command line or learning Perl and the API...

    Here's the command to create a new vm:

    New-VM -Name XP_VM1 -VMHost $hostInCluster1 -ResourcePool ( Get-ResourcePool DevelopmentResources ) -DiskMB 4000 -MemoryMB 256

    vMA, as Helvick mentioned, is my next choice if I don't have windows/powershell access.

    Side note: Pash is a powershell for Linux project. Been meaning to try it out, but haven't had the bandwidth.

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