vCLI required libraries not available on Ubuntu 14.04

[JamesC0]

Referring to vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center installation instructions for Ubuntu:

64 bit. sudo apt-get install ia32-libs build-essential gcc uuid uuid-devel perl libssl-devel perl-doc liburi-perl libxml-libxml-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl

But three libraries are not available:

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs build-essential gcc uuid uuid-devel perl libssl-devel perl-doc liburi-perl libxml-libxml-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree      

Reading state information... Done

Package ia32-libs is not available, but is referred to by another package.

This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or

is only available from another source

However the following packages replace it:

  lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32bz2-1.0

E: Package 'ia32-libs' has no installation candidate

E: Unable to locate package uuid-devel

E: Unable to locate package libssl-devel

Give the above, what is the recommended course of action to get vCLI installed on Ubuntu 14.04?

Thanks!

[JamesC0]

After some experimentation, I managed to get this to work.

As per the above, the instructions for Ubuntu x64 say:

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs build-essential gcc uuid uuid-devel perl libssl-devel perl-doc liburi-perl libxml-libxml-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl

But it is necessary to replace the packages as follows:

• Replace ia32-libs with lib32z1
• Replace libssl-devel with libssl-dev
• Replace uuid-devel with uuid-dev

Resulting prerequisites:

$ sudo apt-get install lib32z1 build-essential gcc uuid uuid-dev perl libssl-dev perl-doc liburi-perl libxml-libxml-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl

But after all that, apparently esxcli has no mechanism to actually start a virtual machine.  It's necessary to SSH into the host to do that.  But if I have to SSH in anyway, what's the point of bothering with esxcli?  Absolutely hilarious!