Install the VI Perl Toolkit on OS X
Installing the VI Perl Toolkit on OS X
by Wil van Antwerpen
Installing Developer Tools
The VI Perl Toolkit needs to get a few extra packages to the perl setup that is by default installed on Mac OS X. In order to get these package we use CPAN. Perl CPAN has some prerequisites of its own.
For starters your system must have "make" installed. The most straightforward way to get that package installed is to take your original OS X installation disk and install Developer Tools (XcodeTools.mpkg) which can be found under Option Installs on the DVD. Just keep the default settings and you'll be fine.
It is a bit big though (over 2GB) so it is a steep requirement for just getting the VI Perl toolkit to work OK. If you don't have the space, the part that is needed is the BSD "make" command and a number of other commands. It should be sufficient to install the UNIX Development Support (or BSD SDK) sub-package of the Developer Tools.
Getting the Perl VI Toolkit SDK
First step is to download the latest perl SDK from: http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/vsphere_sdk_perl
for OS X Leopard I downloaded the 32 bits .tar.gz linux installer.
Then untar the archive by running
tar -xvzf VMware-vSphere-SDK-for-Perl-4.0.0-161974.i386.tar.gz
from the command line. cd into the new vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib/ folder
cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib/
and run:
perl MakeFile.pl
this will most likely return the following warnings:
Warning: prerequisite Class::MethodMaker 2.08 not found. Warning: prerequisite Crypt::SSLeay 0.51 not found. Warning: prerequisite SOAP::Lite 0.67 not found. Warning: prerequisite UUID 0.03 not found. Writing Makefile for VIPerlToolkit
The warnings we see here are the packages we need to install in perl that are missing for the toolkit to work.
Installing missing perl dependencies
So now we need to setup CPAN unless you already have it working, then you can skip this step.
Is /usr/local setup?
By default cpan will try to install some documentation under the /usr/local folder, so this folder has to exist and it needs to have the correct ownership privileges setup. See if the folder already exists:
$ ls /usr/ X11 bin lib sbin standalone X11R6 include libexec share
In my case it isn't there yet, so create it:
$ mkdir /usr/local mkdir: /usr/local: Permission denied
Ha!.. you can't create the folder unless you have elevated rights (of course)
$ sudo mkdir /usr/local Password:
So now we create the folder, but as you will see its owned by root and we can't install our packages in there unless we allow our user.
$ ls -alh /usr/local total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 68B Feb 27 01:06 . drwxr-xr-x@ 12 root wheel 408B Feb 27 01:06 ..
In my case the username is "topaz", replace "topaz" with your username below:
$ sudo chown topaz:topaz /usr/local $ ls -alh /usr/local total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 topaz topaz 68B Feb 27 01:06 . drwxr-xr-x@ 12 topaz topaz 408B Feb 27 01:06 ..
Configure CPAN
With the developer tools setup now you have to configure CPAN. You can also use this step if you want to change your CPAN configuration. Configuring CPAN makes sure that the tools finds the necessary commands on your system (make et al). To do that, run:
perl -MCPAN -e shell cpan> o conf init
This throws up a bunch of questions.
/Users/topaz/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm initialized. CPAN is the world-wide archive of perl resources. It consists of about 100 sites that all replicate the same contents all around the globe. Many countries have at least one CPAN site already. The resources found on CPAN are easily accessible with the CPAN.pm module. If you want to use CPAN.pm, you have to configure it properly. If you do not want to enter a dialog now, you can answer 'no' to this question and I'll try to autoconfigure. (Note: you can revisit this dialog anytime later by typing 'o conf init' at the cpan prompt.) Are you ready for manual configuration? [yes]
You can take the defaults for pretty much all of them, so just press enter. It is fine if the configuration script doesn't find programs for things like lynx, wget, ncftp, ftp etcetera...
The main things to select are country to download from and the site(s) which you want to use for the repositories. Just make the most logical selections here.
Installing the VI Perl Toolkit dependencies
Now we'll get the missing dependencies by running them one by one. We could add all of these on a single line, but we want it to be easy to see if the install was successful so we are running them one by one.
cpan Class::MethodMaker
this should now end with:
Appending installation info to /Library/Perl/Updates/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/perllocal.pod /usr/bin/make install -- OK
So continue with the next one:
cpan Crypt::SSLeay
Just choose the defaults if questions are asked. As long as it ends like the previous package you are fine.
Next up is:
cpan SOAP::Lite
Same same, choose defaults. In my setup it nagged that I missed out on some dependencies of its own and if I wanted to add those.. Sure.. let the installer add anything it suggests.
Finally:
cpan UUID
Which down here installed fine too, so now we can finally get back to installing the VI Perl Toolkit.
Install VI Perl Toolkit
Now go back to the folder where you unpacked the VI Perl Toolkit:
perl MakeFile.pl Warning: prerequisite UUID 0.03 not found. We have 0.020. Writing Makefile for VIPerlToolkit
That UUID is not yet version 0.03 seems to be OK With this version of the toolkit, there are no tests defined for the make file so install it directly:
sudo make install Password: Manifying blib/man3/VMware::VIM25Runtime.3pm Manifying blib/man3/VMware::VIM2Stub.3pm Manifying blib/man3/VMware::VIM25Stub.3pm Manifying blib/man3/VMware::VIM2Runtime.3pm Installing /Library/Perl/5.8.8/vmware-install.pl Installing /Library/Perl/5.8.8/VMware/VICommon.pm Installing /Library/Perl/5.8.8/VMware/VICredStore.pm .... many more lines here .... Installing /usr/share/doc/vmware-viperl/doc/samples/vm/vmregister.pl Installing /usr/share/doc/vmware-viperl/doc/samples/vm/vmunregister.pl Installing /usr/share/doc/vmware-viperl/doc/samples/WSMan/checksensorhealth.pl Installing /usr/share/doc/vmware-viperl/doc/samples/WSMan/firmwarerevisions.pl Installing /usr/share/doc/vmware-viperl/doc/samples/WSMan/listfrus.pl Installing /usr/share/doc/vmware-viperl/doc/samples/WSMan/listpowersupplies.pl
and that's how a successful Perl Toolkit install looks like.
If you want you can now delete your unpacked setup files and VI Perl tar.gz file.
Uninstall Developer Tools and cleaning up CPAN
If you want to uninstall the Developer Tools, you need to run the command:
/Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all
From CPAN you can remove an installed module by running a clean command. Such as:
cpan clean Class::MethodMaker
This is sometimes needed if a module gets stuck while trying to install it.
If CPAN still gives problems, then you can remove your local CPAN configuration and cache directory by running:
rm -r ~/.cpan
External link
The following link turned out to be very helpful while I was trying to get this to work:
Managing VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) from OS X (10.5.1 Leopard)
