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Dec 11

VMware RCLI now writes to ESXi Free Hosts

API, VMwarePost by Mike DiPetrilloAdd comments

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.

ESX Version and Serial.png

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

ESXi Version.png

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

Current Networking.png

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.

Add PG Command.png

Now with U3 this actually does complete without any errors and you get the network configuration shown below.

New Networking.png

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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VMware RCLI now writes to ESXi Free Hosts5.051

  • Rick
    What about the VIMA? Doesn't it provide everything the RCLI does and more? And already works with ESXi?
  • VIMA, like the other API sets (VI Toolkit for Windows, RCLI, VIM SDK, etc) all hit the internal API set of ESXi. That toolset was locked down prior to U3 unless you had bought at least the Foundation SKU of Virtual Infrastructure and were managing it via Virtual Center. Once you had a VC license for the ESXi host then anything would work. If you were just using the free, standalone license then you only got read-only access. That all changes with U3 so you can now do read-write no matter which solution you're using.
  • Steve
    Great to know. Does it mean there is no difference between the free version and licensed one?
  • Yup. No difference at all. Everything is just license key activated. All of the code is there though. Makes it real easy if you decide to step up later for the more advanced and useful features.
  • Stu
    Awesome Mike, nice work
  • Sweet...this would definitely apply to the Windows PowerShell VI Toolkit as well, then.
  • Jame
    I don't if it was working with U2 but I have tried it with U3. And it works well. You can backup / restore the ESXi configuration with
    vicfg-cfgbackup.pl -s c:\config.txt / vicfg-cfgbackup -f -l c:\config.txt
  • lemonadecowboy
    I am little bit disappointed with RCLI - it is just like empty box, I wrote down some scripts for RCLI. And from my experience there missing some basic settings for deployment ESXi:

    -rename existing portgroup (or edit VLAN)
    -rename local storage - you can create local storage, for my surprise you cannot delete existing one - this influence another thing - easily set scratch partition - I find some workaround
    -set nic failover order on vswitch, also on portgroup

    so when I try to deploy 10 ESXi, I have to use UDA for pxe boot ESXi and unfortunatelly manually go through install process, then I execute RCLI scripts, then I need to set up rest - like failover order manually on all ESXi - uff really tough deployment..
  • Dave
    Is this read/write situation carried through to ESX 4i?
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