I have recently found interest in a system called OpenQRM to manage Virtual Machines / Appliances, as well as Cloud Machines (Public / Private). One of the plugins bundled with OpenQRM allows you to manage VMWare ESX Servers. It will scan the network and auto-discover VMWare Servers, However unless you install the VMWare Perl SDK it will fail to connect to the remote VMWare.

I had some trouble installing the Perl SDK, and decided to share what I’ve done so others may have an easier time installing it on Ubuntu Lucid.

As a preparation step, install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install libarchive-zip-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libclass-methodmaker-perl libdata-dump-perl libsoap-lite-perl perl-doc libssl-dev libuuid-perl liburi-perl libxml-libxml-perl

Once that’s done, you need to download the actual SDK from VMWare.com – You need an account to access the download section. Once you are logged in, the URL to access the SDK is:

https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=sdkperl50

When I ran the installer for the first time, it seemed as if it was done installing. There was a warning about HTTP and FTP Proxies not being defined, but I ignored it at first, thinking it was done but just complaining a bit. It turns out that it actually fails to install if those proxies are not defined.

To circumvent this, I just set them with empty values, and that did the trick:

export http_proxy=
export ftp_proxy=

Then unpack and run the installer:

tar xvzf VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-5.0.0-422456.i386.tar.gz
cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib
./vmware-install.pl

This time, the installer will install missing Perl module via CPAN, and after a few minutes (depending on how fast your system is), it will complete the installation.

Now when you add a VMWare ESX system within OpenQRM, it will manage to establish a connection to VMWare without a problem, and add the VMWare system to the Appliances database.