Rich over at VM/Etc and Duncan over at Yellow-Bricks both blogged about the fact that the VMware RCLI now does read/write to the free ESXi version. This is really great news. Prior to ESXi 3.5 U3 the RCLI was read-only meaning you could get a listing of portgroups for example but you couldn’t add any. This also broke some free scripts out there like the Quick Migration script I had written sometime back. I thought this was a little short sighted although I can understand some of the reasoning. I pushed hard with engineering and they understood my case and quickly worked to unlock the API all the way down the stack. Kudos to engineering for that quick work. Not sure why but you won’t find any press releases about this – just a few people picking it up on blogs. Just to show it working I have a few pictures from my lab here at the house.
This is a picture of one of my hosts. You can see it’s running ESX Server 3i, 3.5.0 Build 123629.

That’s the U3 build of the free ESXi. You can see the version in the download info on the free ESXi site.

A quick look at our current networking setup shows an out of the box configuration of the host.

We can use the RCLI to setup a new portgroup. Prior to U3 this would error out because you couldn’t write or change anything with the RCLI.
Now with U3 this actually does complete without any errors and you get the network configuration shown below.

Pretty awesome, huh? There’s a lot more you can do with the RCLI. Make sure to go take a look. If you come up with anything really cool make sure to comment back here how you’re using it.
NOTE: Make sure to read the update to this blog posting.
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Rick
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Mike DiPetrillo
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Steve
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Mike DiPetrillo
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Stu
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halr9000
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Jame
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lemonadecowboy
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Dave
