Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

Setting up the environment

For this chapter, we will have VMware ESXi version 5.5 installed over a Cisco UCS server and host a few virtual machines. We need to enable a few things in our ESXi server in order to expose some external ports to the outside world:

1. The first thing is to enable both Shell and SSH access to the ESXi console. Basically, ESXi allows you to manage it using the vSphere client (based on C# for the versions before 5.5.x and based on HTML for version 6 and up). Once we enable the Shell and SSH access, this will give us the ability to use the CLI to manage virtual infrastructure and to perform tasks such as creating, deleting, and customizing the virtual machine.

2. Access the ESXi vSphere client and go to Configuration ...