ESXi Update 3 enables full remote administration via RCLI

update 12.15.08 - the ESXi 3.5 Update 3 RCLI API was unintentionally opened. The remote administration abilities will be locked down again in the next release. Please see my updated post on this new information.

I wrote the post What’s the difference between free ESXi and licensed ESXi? back in August and it has become one of my most read posts. Since that time VMware has released ESXi Update 3 and some things have changed. For example, the Remote Command Line Interface is now read and write thus enabling complete remote configuration management and administration. There are also a few new GUI based tools available using the ESXi API. I have updated my original post to highlight the new features as well as make some corrections that were pointed out to me by Mike Dipetrillo.

Check out the new notes added to the body of my post from August for more information.

To check out all the changes go to the current release notes on ESXi Update 3 here.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 7:37 am and is filed under vmetc.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tony

Actually, ESXGuide does not support ESXi, which they explicitly mention on their web-site.

The other two tools, Trilead and VIC share the same file management engine/API, and are unacceptably slow in terms of file operations performance. It takes hours to copy anything. I am getting just about 3-4 MB/s max when copying files to ESXi with Trilead, compare that with FastSCP file copy to regular ESX host (40-60 MB/s).

Lack of usable ESXi management tools is probably the biggest problem preventing ESXi adoption at the momemnt.

rbrambley

Tony,

Rereading my post I see how the tools post link is misleading. I am aware that ESX Manager 2.3 does not support ESXi. Sorry for the confusion.

Others have commented that they are getting extremely slow transfer rates with the VIC datastore browser too. I have yet to experience it.

I always forget about FastSCP. I did not realize it was that much faster.

If you are interested in VMware's future direction for ESXi management check out my notes from the VMworld 2008 session http://vmetc.com/2008/09/17/managing-esx-in-a-c...