I have a VMWare ESXi host. I can manage it through VMWare Fusion, although the options seem limited (I’m used to using vCenter Server, but I don’t have the license for that in this environment). I thought I’d give the VMWare vSphere Command Line Interface (CLI) a try. This was a mistake, but if you insist on following me down the same path, see the Drivers and Tools section on the VMWare vSphere Downloads page to get started.
First I tried vmware-cmd.
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI>vmware-cmd
'vmware-cmd' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
The actual file is vmware-cmd.pl (it’s in the bin folder).
I was able to run one command, to list the virtual machines on the host:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI>vmware-cmd.pl -H esxi.osric.net -l
Enter username: chris
Enter password:
The documentation I was looking at was probably outdated, as the newer documentation gives better examples. But the version I was looking at indicated that most of the other commands require a <config_file_path> or <cfg> parameter. Unfortunately, it does not specify what those values consist of or what they might look like. There was a hint in the docs in vmware-cmd Overview:
vmware-cmd is a legacy tool and supports the usage of VMFS paths for virtual machine configuration files. As a rule, use datastore paths to access virtual machine configuration files.
It appears that <cfg> is the path to the VMX. There are several different ways to specify this:
Full path using GUID
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI>vmware-cmd.pl -H esxi.osric.net /vmfs/volumes/272c880d-a89548c1-a530-4bccbbad9507/benvolio/benvolio.vmx uptime
Enter username: chris
Enter password:
getuptime() = 7193
(The GUID is displayed in the output of the list of virtual machines from vmware-cmd.pl -l.)
Full path using Datastore Name
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI>vmware-cmd.pl -H esxi.osric.net "/vmfs/volumes/test vms/benvolio/benvolio.vmx" uptime
Enter username: chris
Enter password:
getuptime() = 7578
Datastore Name + relative path
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI>vmware-cmd.pl -H esxi.osric.net "[test vms] benvolio/benvolio.vmx" uptime
Enter username: chris
Enter password:
getuptime() = 7822
Entering my username and password every time is tedious though. According to the Connection Options for vmware-cmd:
The vmware-cmd vCLI command supports only a specific set of connection options. Other vCLI connection options are not supported, for example, you cannot use variables because the corresponding option is not supported.
In this case, I have the vSphere CLI installed on a password-protected Windows 2012r2 virtual machine, so I didn’t feel it was too much of a risk to set a temporary environment variable to store some of the connection options:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI>SET VMOPTIONS=-H esxi.osric.net -U chris -P t0u6hpa55w0rd
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI>vmware-cmd.pl %VMOPTIONS% -l
Remember how the documentation said that “vmware-cmd is a legacy tool”?
I’m not sure what the official replacement is–possibly the PowerShell-based VMWare vSphere PowerCLI–but it turns out that the vSphere Client is free. Accessing your ESXi host via HTTPS should provide a link to download the installer. The vSphere Client does not appear to be something you can script against or automate, but for simple tasks it is much easier to use than vmware-cmd.pl.