VMware has a strong GUI focus for the majority of Sysadmins and Virtual Admins that use it.

That said; there is a huge command line, shell and APIs available for power users, for people who want the next level of certification from VMware (VMware Certified Advanced Professional) you need to know how to do common GUI tasks via CLI and troubleshoot via CLI.

There is a surprising amount of tools under the hood, but if you want to compare it to something Linux based I'm going to speculate that it isn't as extensive.

vCLI (Windows, Linux, & Linux appliance) and PowerCLI (Windows Powershell) are both quite extensive.

Why does every Linux admin who's worked with VMWare think the CLI tools are terrible? Do they require a JVM or other prerequisite to operate? Are they not natively packaged for common distributions? Do they use non-native conventions for the platform? (e.g. using / as an option argument prefix) Are they not simple scripts that could be ported to OS X and run from Homebrew?

If my colleagues are just misinformed, that's one thing, but I'm hearing this feedback from people I generally trust. I'd love to have a neutral opinion on the CLI toolset quality.

The vCLI is kinda terrible. It's Perl so it will run anywhere but installers are only available for Linux and Windows. The core vCLI tools -- esxcfg-, vicfg-, vmware-cmd -- are geared for Host and vCenter interactions. For Guest creation / configuration you'll end up digging into the Perl SDK, which is included in the vCLI. It comes with many more scripts but you'll end up hacking on them to cover all of the functionality that you need.

The PowerCLI stuff is way better. It has comprehensive coverage of everything the GUI does and conforms to Powershell conventions. In my experience it is lacking for nothing.

Think of some simple operation you'd like to perform., like starting an existing virtual machine. Now read the documentation and try to figure out how to do it.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp#com.vmware.vcli....

I looked into the vSphere APIs recently and they were pretty bad. The samples were written in C# and Java, with the Java samples being fairly well written. The C# samples were terrible.

    ManagedObjectReference dcmor = cb.getServiceUtil().GetDecendentMoRef(null,"Datacenter",dcName);

There's a whole lot of ^ that all over the place. They expose very low level objects.

AFAIK there are also lots of Perl examples floating around too, which may be nicer for the traditional admin.

Also pyvmomi (python), rbvmomi (ruby), vijava (might be what you were looking at), and the perl kit (also probably what you were looking at).

I did a project in pyvmomi and I was very impressed with its flexibility.

Lovely, thanks for pointing that out. I'm a python person myself, so I'll definitely take a look at that. My sysadmins are still deploying servers the old fashioned way - I'd like to make their lives easier. We've automated (puppet) the configuration, but not the deployment.