Scripting VMWare ESXi from a linux server

I’m attempting to use the VMWare command line interface to mount a datastore ISO file in the CD/DVD drive of a virtual machine. An entry elsewhere on serverfault tells me that ‘vmware-cmd blabla.vmx setconfig ide0:0.fileName cdrom.iso’ ought to do what I need, but my installation of the command line tool does not have the setconfig command.

Further research shows that the setconfig command has been removed from the command line tools, and there are even some suggestions that vmware-cmd is deprecated.

I'm developing an automated deployment/configuration system using puppet, and my aim is to test that system on virtualised infrastructure as a nightly build on Jenkins.

Our Jenkins server is a linux server, so we can't use the VMWare Power CLI (which is Windows only).

Has anyone tried to mount an iso on an ESXI virtual machine from the Linux command line in the recent past? If so, how did you do it?

Solution 1:

I haven't performed this particular task, but I have done many other things in an automated way using pysphere (http://code.google.com/p/pysphere/). The documentation isn't as thorough as I might prefer, but it's gotten the job done for me so far.

Solution 2:

An alternative to PySphere is pyVmomi.

You might also be able to make use of virsh (which is possibly part of your Linux distribution) or rvc.

edit: What is the Difference between PySphere and PyVmomi?