6.5

The vCLI installer installs both vSphere SDK for Perl and vCLI because many vCLI commands run on
top of the vSphere SDK for Perl. The content of the installer package diers for dierent platforms.
Platform Installation Process
Windows You must install required software. The installation package includes vCLI and vSphere SDK for
Perl.
Red Hat
Enterprise Linux
You must install required software. See “Installing Required Prerequisite Software for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux,” on page 19.
The installer for RHEL prompts you to choose whether you want to install additional modules
from the Internet or from the package.
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If you have Internet access, you can congure the installer to download Perl modules from
CPAN.
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The installer can instead install Perl modules that it does not nd on your system from the
installer package.
SLES and
Ubuntu
You must install required software and you must have Internet access. See “Installing
Prerequisite Software for Linux Systems with Internet Access,” on page 20.
The installer downloads other Perl modules from CPAN.
After installation, you can run vCLI commands and vSphere SDK for Perl utility applications from the
operating system command line. Each time you run a command, you can specify the target server
connection options directly or indirectly. You can also write scripts and manage your vSphere
environment using those scripts.
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vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) - Deploy vMA, a virtual machine that administrators can use to
run scripts that manage vSphere, on an ESXi host. vMA includes vCLI, vSphere SDK for Perl, and other
prepackaged software in a Linux environment.
vMA supports noninteractive login. If you establish an ESXi host as a target server, you can run vCLI
host management commands and vSphere SDK for Perl commands against that server without
additional authentication. If you establish a vCenter Server system as a target server, you can run most
vCLI commands against all ESXi systems that server manages without additional authentication. See
“Deploying vMA,” on page 24.
Overview of Linux Installation Process
The installation script for vCLI is supported on the Linux distributions that are listed in the Release Notes.
The vCLI package installer installs the vCLI scripts and the vSphere SDK for Perl. The installation proceeds
as follows.
1 The installer checks whether the following required prerequisite software are installed on the system.
Perl Perl version 5.8.8 or version 5.10 must be installed on your system
OpenSSL The vCLI requires SSL because most connections between the system on which you run the command
and the target vSphere system are encrypted with SSL.
The OpenSSL library (libssl-devel package) is not included in the default Linux distribution. See
“Installing Required Prerequisite Software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” on page 19 and “Installing
Prerequisite Software for Linux Systems with Internet Access,” on page 20.
LibXML2 Used for XML parsing. The vCLI client requires 2.6.26 or later. If you have an older version installed, you
must upgrade to 2.6.26 or later.
The libxml2 package is not included in the default Linux distribution. See “Installing Required
Prerequisite Software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” on page 19 and “Installing Prerequisite Software
for Linux Systems with Internet Access,” on page 20.
uuid
Included in uuid-devel for SLES 11 and in e2fsprogs-devel for other Linux platforms. Required by
the UUID Perl module.
Getting Started with vSphere Command-Line Interfaces
16 VMware, Inc.