VI-Toolkit:Community Portal
Main Index
The starting point for any developer is http://www.vmware.com/developer but as there is a overwhelming amount of information available, we are trying to make it easier accessible on this site.
Hopefully we'll succeed at that over time, it is a pretty high goal. It certainly isn't the case yet, but time will tell.
Management Virtual Machines
VMware ESX 3.5 and earlier had the management console, a stripped down linux console which was could be used for automating and managing your virtual machines. As of ESX 3.5i this is no longer available and the future is to move away from the fat hypervisor. In order to manage your virtual machines in a similar way as before, we now have special virtual machines that come with management software pre-installed. VMware delivers 2 appliances for this, the VIMA and the RCLI.
This is a 64bits virtual machine based on RHEL.
Features that VIMA has over the RCLI:
- component for caching authentication
- component for collecting ESX log files (remote logging)
- Designed to host agents that will be released by some 3rd party developers
- Includes a mechanism for VMware to provide updates
- Supported for production use
This comes in several flavors.
- You can download it as a small 32 bit virtual machine based on Ubuntu JEOS
- There is a separate linux setup so that you can install it in your own linux machine (virtual or not)
- There is also a windows installed.
The appliance has the VI perl toolkit pre-installed, but beware of the following note:
This version of the VMware Infrastructure Remote CLI is incompatible with VI Perl Toolkit. These two products should be installed on different machines. The next refresh of the Remote CLI will fix this incompatibility.
Unfortunately the last RCLI was released on december 2007, so I'm not sure we will see an update on this.
