On 05/09/13 18:14, Scott Robbins wrote:
On Thu, Sep 05, 2013 at 11:04:51AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:46 AM,m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
And yes, I'm well aware that ESXi is a modified version of, mmm, is it still RHEL 3, or have they gone up yet?
The linux components were just for the shell-level interaction and I think they are mostly gone now. In any case, they don't have security updates nearly as often as RHEL/Centos pushes a new kernel which is an advantage for uptime on the guests.
If I remember correctly (but I'm no longer at that job, so don't have access to double check) around VMware 4.x or 5.x it no longer had a Linux shell. Although there are still some commands that work, I _think_ that it's now a very stripped down shell, as opposed to 3.5 which had all the commands available in a Linux shell. So, if I am correct, then Les has summed it up nicely.
The Service Console was removed in the move from ESX to ESXi, so ESX 4.1 and lower has a Service Console based on RHEL (el5 for ESX 4.x, el3 for ESX 3.x). ESXi has a very limited unix userland environment which may or may not be based on RHEL. It's not really meant for general use and I have no experience with it. I prefer to use either the client or the webadministration (vCenter), alternatively I use the vSphere Manager Appliance for remote cli access using esxcli or vi-cfg, and sometimes I'll toy around with PowerCLI in a Windows VM.
-tgc