http://github.com/vmware/rvc

I'm pleased to announce the first public release of RVC, a Linux shell-like interface to ESX and VirtualCenter which presents the vSphere inventory as a virtual filesystem.

Many useful commands are already implemented, like VM power operations, connecting a VMRC or VNC session (to view your virtual machines' consoles), and vMotion. RVC is designed to make it easy for users to add commands of their own, so I'm counting on the community to contribute commands that I (as an ESX kernel developer at VMware) haven't needed yet.

RVC is written in Ruby, so you will need a Ruby interpreter and RubyGems installed, which you can find in your system's package manager. From there it should be a simple "gem install rvc". If you run into any installation problems please let me know. RVC might even work on OS X but I have not tested it there.

More documentation is available in the GitHub repository README. To get started, run "rvc user@host" and try the "help", "ls", "cd", and "info" commands.

This project is also being released as a VMware Labs Fling, so the same disclaimers apply.

Screencast showing how to run RVC on Windows by Eric Sloof: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1738-Video-Latest-fling-from-VMware-Labs-Ruby-vSphere-Console.html. Windows support is a work in progress and has been improved since this screencast.

Packages needed:

FC14: ruby ruby-devel rubygems kernel-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel libxslt libxslt-devel libffi libffi-devel

Changelog:

2011-06-09: 1.4.0 released. Added OS X keychain support, permissions commands, shared sessions, and more.

2011-04-19: 1.3.0 released. Added aggregate marks, datastore.edit, and improved Windows compatibility.

2011-04-12: 1.2.0 released. Added wildcards, guest power ops, and ssh enhancements.

2011-04-05: 1.1.0 released. Added support for linked clones and host maintenance mode operations.

2011-03-26: Initial release.