Support of Perl SDK's vmclone.pl for ESXi without vCenter

[ntrivedi]

I'm looking to use vmclone.pl from the Perl SDK 5.5 release.  I have an ESXi server with VMs that I'd like to remotely clone.  However when I attempt to invoke the perl scipt, I get an error " Operation is not supported by the current agent".

I was lead to believe that the Perl SDK operates on ESXi without vCenter Server.  Is this accurate?  Is my error due to another reason?

[lamw · Accepted solution]

vSphere SDK for Perl can operate on either ESXi or vCenter, it is just an interface to the APIs. However, in the case of Cloning which is a feature, this is only exposed when vCenter Server is in the picture. You can not issue a clone operation directly on an ESXi host and that is why the fault was thrown.

[rohitk22]

Just extending the answer given by the Iamw...

1. get the hostinfo of vCenter. basically the "hostname".

2. execute the below file...

perl vmclone.pl --

url <vCenter IP>/sdk/vimservice --username "root" --password "password" --

vmname "TestVM" --vmhost "<IP of ESXi>" --vmname "TestVM" --vmname_destination "

Cloned_TestVM"

@Iamw ....  How can we execute iso OS from API..?