Installing VMWare vCLI

The vCLI utilities make it possible to manage VMWare ESX servers (with the possibility of using vCenter). Even though Arch Linux is not one of the "supported platforms"; the installation process is relatively straightforward. We have a two method's of VMWare vCLI installation. It is a build package from AUR, or manually installation.

Installation from AUR

Install vmware-vcli^AUR from AUR.

Manually installation

Download location

The utilities can be downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vcli. Registration is mandatory. It seems that registration is not enough to download latest release from this link. It gives "Download is not available."

5.1 can be downloaded from here: https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/details?downloadGroup=VSP510-VCLI-510&productId=285

Dependencies

vCLI has quite a few dependencies which can easily be managed via pacman: e2fsprogs openssl libxml2 perl perl-xml-sax perl-uri perl-lwp-protocol-https perl-class-methodmaker .

Installation

Unpack the archive:

tar xzvf VMware-vSphere-CLI-5*.tar.gz

Change to the newly created directory:

cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib/

Open the file with your favorite editor. Change the following rules:

my $installed_ssl_version = '1.0.0';   # rule 5248
my $ssleay_installed = 1;              # rule 5250
my $OpenSSL_installed = 1;             # rule 5256
my $LibXML2_installed = 1;             # rule 5257
my $OpenSSL_dev_installed = 1;         # rule 5258
my $e2fsprogs_installed = 1;           # rule 5261 
my $e2fsprogs_version = '1.42';        # rule 5262
my $install_rhel55_local = 1;          # rule 5266

The next step is to configure a ftp and http proxy. These values are mandatory, even when you are not using a proxy (in which case you leave the values in a blank state):

export ftp_proxy=""
export http_proxy=""

Fire up the installation:

./vmware-install.pl 

Potential warnings about rpm and versions can be safely ignored.