Deploying Template-Based VMs from Linux – A Step-by-Step Guide

command-line-interfacelinuxvmware-esxivmware-vsphere

We are trying to provide our Linux engineers with a CLI to deploy VMWare vSphere VMs using templates.

The vSphere CLI looks promising but the documentation doesn't mention templates.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about this?

The only option I've found would be using the PySphere SDK

I've used it to do snapshot consolidation and cleanup, but it can certainly do VM creation from a template.

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

After some serious googling, perl bashing and a little despair I hit on this forum post, and in particular of interest, this script.

Usage:

./updateVMDVPortgroup.pl --server 10.10.15.15 --vmname development-3 \
   --vnic 1 --portgroup dvPortGroup-Inside --dvs dc1-cluster-e01-dvSwitch2

Just the job!