VMware CLI package

1 Intro

If you need the VMware CLI or SDK installed on Enterprise Linux, the usual procedure is to install from tarball. I don't like tarballs for installing software on production systems and prefer RPM instead as it gives a nicer way to update, uninstall without leaving garbage behind, etc.

vSphere Perl SDK and CLI RPM Packages provides a nice method of building the SDK and CLI as RPM packages that you can then put in a local YUM repository.

However the latest version provided is for VMware 5.1 and I needed 5.5, so I modified the build a bit.

Note: the VMware packages created with this procedure do NOT require Outrun, they can be installed as standalone packages.

Note: For copyright reasons I cannot provide completely built packages. Also the Source RPM package does NOT include the VMware tar.gz file required to build the RPM. You need to download that file yourself using a valid my.vmware.com login.

2 Changes

• 2015-08-13
  • Updated to release 2 which removes the 32-bit dependency packages. As a consequence, the bundled-in "resxtop" tool no longer works. You can install the meta package VMware-vSphere-resxtop which will solve dependencies for 32-bit packages.
• Initial version
  • Updated to 5.5 version (build 2043780)
  • Included a /etc/profile.d/vmware-cli.sh script that adds the VMware bin directory to $PATH for all users
  • Added a NoSource tag to the SPEC file so I can create a Source RPM package that does NOT contain VMware copyrighted material.

3 Build procedure

(as build user, do NOT use root)

• Setup a build environment as described in Building_RPM_Packages
• Download the source RPM package from here
• rpm -i <srpm package>
• go to $HOME/SOURCES and download VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-5.5.0-2043780.x86_64.tar.gz from here, md5sum acf30529e00783f4a06ff5ce3ec9545c
• go to $HOME/SPECS
• rpmbuild -bb VMware-vSphere-SDK-CLI.spec

It may complain about missing dependencies that you need to install (as root, via YUM) first

• Copy the created RPM packages to your favourite local YUM repository and update using createrepo

Packages created:

VMware-vSphere-CLI-5.5.0-2043780.2.el6.x86_64.rpm

VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-5.5.0-2043780.2.el6.x86_64.rpm

VMware-vSphere-resxtop-5.5.0-2043780.2.el6.x86_64.rpm

4 Installing

The usual way via rpm install or (preferably) YUM. Using YUM will also fetch the required depencencies (i.e various Perl libraries).

5 Using

A list of files that get installed can be requested via RPM: rpm -ql VMware-vSphere-CLI

After re-login on EL6 systems you should see /opt/vmware/bin included in your $PATH.

How to use the CLI and SDK is beyond the scope of this wiki ;-)