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-vcliAUR 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-crypt-ssleay perl-archive-zip perl-html-parser perl-data-dump perl-soap-lite perl-uri perl-lwp-protocol-https perl-class-methodmaker perl-net-ssleay perl-xml-libxml.
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 vmware-install.pl 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.