ESXi Support

FinalBuilder Discussion
1

Hello,

Can the ESXi server be controlled from FinalBuilder? i've tried doing so without any success.

What we need is a few basic actions to be performed (list snapshots, revert to a snapshot, power options).

 

If it is not supported, is it planned to be supported in upcoming releases perhaps?

Thanks

Lior

2

Hi Lior

The following VMWare actions in FinalBuilder use the vmrun.exe utility to control the virtual machines:
VMWare - List Virtual Machines
VMWare - Change Virtual Machine State
VMWare - Snapshot
VMWare - Execute Guest Command

You will need to ensure that you have the VIX API (which includes the vmrun utility) installed on the machine that you are running FinalBuilder on. You can download the latest version of this API from here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api

EDIT: Sorry I misread the question. You can only control VMWare guests using the actions within FinalBuilder, this is because the VMWare VIX actions use the vmrun utility which requires the path to the .vmx file. The other VMWare actions (Workstation/Server) are designed to manage the virtual machines themselves, not the host.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Steve

3

Thanks for the quick reply.

When you say host, you mean the ESXi server hosting VMs on it right?
I’d like to be able to control snapshots and power up or down VMs on the ESXi server.

Still haven’t found a solution to do so with the existing actions.

The other (harder) solution is to create my own set of actions using the VMWare vSphere SDK, which gives this ability.

Just wanted to check if this is already available before creating my own library.

Lior

p.s - i can release this library to the community once it’ll reach a working stage, if there’s any need for it.

4

Sorry, I gathered from your original post that you wanted to control the ESXi host machine itself.

If you want to control the Virtual Machines running on an ESXi host, then you should be able to use the VMWare actions within FinalBuilder. According to the VMWare VIX API documentation, as of version 1.7 ESXi is supported. This should allow you to use the following actions to manage you virtual machines:

VMWare - List Virtual Machines
VMWare - Change Virtual Machine State
VMWare - Snapshot
VMWare - Execute Guest Command

Regards,
Steve