HI Folks,
I'm pretty new to VMware and honestly, navigating through the available APIs and product descriptions is pretty confusing. I'm hoping I can tell you what I want to do and what I've tried and you can point me in the right direction.
I'm running ESX in several remote locations. I want to be do the following actions in a scripted manner on the ESX server and guest OSes in these remote locations. For now, all of my guest OSes are Linux and I don't expect that to change.
* Turn on/off/suspend/restart (vmrun can do this)
* Run commands inside the guest (vmrun can do this)
* Create and Clone Guest VMs in the remote location (?)
* get data about the ESX server (CPU, disk, memory, network I/O, etc.)
* get data about the Guest OSes (vmrun to run commands, unless there is a better way)
So, the big question in my mind is the create and clone. Looks like certain versions of vmrun support "clone" (looks like later version don't?). I've also come across the vsphere client, which doesn't run on anything but windows (boo!) but I'm not even sure if should be using it.
So, what should I use? I also see the VI Java API, which seems to be an open source implementation?
Any help you guys can give is most appreciated.
Thanks,
Tom