We have a brand new Dell 28-something-or-other that is running bare metal VMWare ESXi 3. I'm getting conflicting information on whether there's a command line console for things lke creating new VMs, etc.
I want to be able to automate (preferably with Ruby) creation, deletion, configuration, booting, etc of Linux (Ubuntu) guests.
I already have the deployment process automated, once the machine is up, I just need to tie the VM provisioning into it, ideally as a poolparty remoter.
Options I think I have but am not entirely sure about:
The tool Vmware offers for this is the VMware Infrastructure Remote Command Line. (Download & Docs)
See Importing the RCLI Appliance
The also-somewhat-misnamed VMware Infrastructure Toolkit is another excellent way to script and automate VMware administration tasks.
The one catch is that VI Toolkit is based on Windows PowerShell, so you'll likely need a Windows machine (or VM) around to work with it, as it's probably not supported on the Linux/Unix port of PowerShell (Pash).
However, it might be worth your time to install the free Windows 7 Release Candidate in a virtual machine and experiment with it. The PowerShell interface for VMware ESXi is extremely powerful, and has quickly become the preferred method for VM automation for Windows-based admins.
It's not trivial. Yes, there is a command line console. There's also some sort of web interface. Neither of them are particularly wonderful to automate against. Given that you're obviously tech-savvy, why run VMWare at all? Use one of the open source virtualisation systems out there, they're all easier to automate against, don't have VMWare's staggering licencing costs, and in my experience, don't perform any worse.