Hello everyone,

This time I will be talking about how to use Govc, a CLI alternative developed in the GO programming language, this CLI is designed to be an easy-to-use alternative to the Web GUI and very suitable for automation tasks. This tool is based on govmomi, which is a library for GO used to interact with the VMware vSphere Application Programming Interface (API).

Note: vSphere versions that have reached end of support may work, but are not officially supported.

Here is the link so you can see the features of this tool.

This tool can be installed in many ways but for this tutorial I will use the compiled version. To use another installation method you can refer to the documentation Govc .

The first step would be to download the tool from the Github portal . In my case I will use the x86_64 version which is the one that corresponds to my Linux system, but this tool provides support for the majority of the most commonly used Operating Systems.

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After downloading the package it is needed to unzip the contents in order to access the compiled file.

[bla@blabla Downloads]$ ls g*
govc_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
[bla@blabla Downloads]$ cp govc_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz govc
[bla@blabla Downloads]$ cd govc/
[bla@blabla govc]$ ls
govc_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
[bla@blabla govc]$ tar -zxf govc_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz -v
CHANGELOG.md
LICENSE.txt
README.md
govc
[bla@blabla govc]$ ls
CHANGELOG.md  `govc`  govc_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz  LICENSE.txt  README.md
[bla@blabla govc]$

In the folder unzipped there is the govc file which is the main binary of the tool. To test with govc I will connect to my HomeLab’s vCenter which uses the FQDN address vcenter-01v.pharmax.local.

[bla@blabla Downloads]$ ./govc about -u administrator@vsphere.local:SECUREPASSWORD@vcenter-01v.pharmax.local
FullName:     VMware vCenter Server 8.0.0 build-20920323
Name:         VMware vCenter Server
Vendor:       VMware, Inc.
Version:      8.0.0
Build:        20920323
OS type:      linux-x64
API type:     VirtualCenter
API version:  8.0.0.1
Product ID:   vpx
UUID:         43f86c8f-1a6d-44c8-b6ac-6ec33a36d141
[bla@blabla govc]$

Note: This tool assumes that the HTTPS certificate can be validated with its trust chain. If the certificate is “Self Sign” it is required to set the GOVC_INSECURE=1 variable

In this article I showed you an introduction about the Govc tool in the next articles I will be going into detail on how to use this tool to streamline the automation processes in our vSphere infrastructure.

Hasta Luego Amigos!