[CentOS] Help with VMware ESXi manager for CentOS - newbie level

[Tom G. Christensen]

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 at 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