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.
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3 Answers
you should use VMware SDK or API calls instead.Look at vmcreate.pl that comes with vSphere SDK for Perl.
monomythmonomyth
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.
HelvickEsxi 6.5 Clone Vm
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PowerCLI is going to be much easier to learn than doing it via ESXi unsupported command line or learning Perl and the API.. Sims 4 luna hair.
Esxi Clone Vm Free Command Line Ssh Connection
Here's the command to create a new vm:
vMA, as Helvick mentioned, is my next choice if I don't have windows/powershell access. The connection connecting children and families foster care program.
Side note: Pash is a powershell for Linux project. Been meaning to try it out, but haven't had the bandwidth.
JakeRobinsonJakeRobinson
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The traditional approach to upgrading vSphere and VMware ESXi involves manually downloading the VIB (short for “vSphere Installation Bundle”) and executing the ESXi
esxcli
command line VIB installer from an ESXi console or SSH session. However, not many realize that esxcli
is actually a full-fledged package manager, and can be used to automatically check for updated packages and install them accordingly, in a similar vein to apt
or yum
.Using
esxcli
in this fashion is actually surprisingly easy, but it does entail typing out the “depot” URL and providing it to esxcli
as a command line argument each time. VMware ESXi and vSphere use this XML file to provide an index of the latest available packages and their version numbers, and can compare the contents against what’s installed locally to upgrade packages as needed.The first step is to make sure that the VMware ESXi SSH service is up and running, so that you can log in remotely to run the
esxcli
update/upgrade commands. This can be done from the “Services” menu in the vSphere client, or from the “Security Profile” section of the “Configuration” tab in vSphere Client:Starting the vSphere/ESXi SSH service via vSphere Client. Click on the image to zoom in.
Starting the SSH service via the vSphere/ESXi web management interface.
Esxi Ssh Commands
Once the SSH service has been enabled, log on to the ESXi server in question over SSH, typically by running
ssh root@IPADDR
where IPADDR
is the address of the vSphere/ESXi host you would like to upgrade. Windows users will likely use putty to establish the SSH connection instead.When you’ve logged in to the ESXi machine securely over SSH, enter the following at the terminal prompt. We recommend copy-and-pasting from below to make sure everything is typed in correctly:
Note that running this command may take awhile, during which the process will appear to be hung. Do not close the SSH connection or attempt to stop the upgrade!
esxcli
will connect to the URL we provided and use that to obtain a list of the latest versions of all packages, then upgrade all outdated packages in the process.Once the upgrade has finished,
esxcli
will print information about all the updates installed to the terminal. At this point, it’s necessary to reboot the ESXi server to use the updated version of the software. If all guests have already been safely shutdown and the server is in maintenance mode (if needed), the vSphere/ESXi server may be rebooted from the SSH session by typing infollowed by the Enter key.