Installing VMware vSphere SDK for Perl

In order to use the check_esx3 plugin with op5 Monitor you will need to install the VMware vSphere SDK for Perl API. Unfortunately, we can not bundle the VMware Perl API with op5 Monitor for legal reasons, but it’s available as a free download (registration needed) from VMware.

Prerequisites

Before installing you will need the following:

  • op5 Monitor >= 3.x
  • op5plugins >= 2.4.0
  • An account at vmware.com to be able to download the Perl API
  • VMware vSphere SDK for Perl Packages (link) (Note: use version, 4.1, 5.x does not work).
  • VMware-vSphere-SDK-for-Perl (.tar.gz 32 or 64-bit version)

Installation

Download the latest version of the vSphere SDK for Perl package from VMware support page. 

In this example we use VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-4.1.0-254719.x86_64.tar.gz, but the instructions should apply to older versions as well. (Not the most recent 5.x releases)

Install the openssl-devel package

yum install openssl-devel

Upload the file to your op5 Monitor server’s /root directory.

cd /root
tar xvzf VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-4.1.0-254719.x86_64.tar.gz
cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl

“Creating a new vSphere CLI installer database using the tar4 format.

Installing vSphere CLI.

You must read and accept the vSphere CLI End User License Agreement to continue.
Press enter to display it.”

<ENTER>

“Read through the License Agreement”

“Do you accept? (yes/no)”

yes

“In which directory do you want to install the executable files?
[/usr/bin]”

<ENTER>

“The following Perl modules were found on the system but may be too old to work
with vSphere CLI:

Crypt::SSLeay 0.55 or newer

Compress::Zlib 2.005 or newer

HTML::Parser 3.60 or newer

URI 1.37 or newer

The installation of vSphere CLI 4.1.0 build-254719 for Linux
completed successfully. You can decide to remove this software from your system
at any time by invoking the following command:
“/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-vSphere-CLI.pl”.

Enjoy,

–the VMware team”

Note: “Crypt::SSLeay” and “Compress::Zlib” are not required for check_esx3 to work.