Installing VMWare vCLI
The vCLI utilities make it possible to manage VMWare ESX servers (with the possibility of using vCenter). Even though Archlinux 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.