vCLI is a command-line administration tool built on vSphere SDK for Perl that runs common system administration commands to manage ESXi hosts and vCenter Server from any machine. The application is available to download at https://code.vmware.com/tool/vsphere-cli/6.5. Including Data Center CLI (DCLI) commands, the tool allows you to manage services in the vSphere REST API.

As compared to vSphere Management Assistant (vMA), vCLI comes as a standalone installer and includes lots of command-line utilities, available in vMA. To manage the vSphere environment, vCLI is available for Windows and Linux OS. The vMA appliance that includes vCLI commands is still available in version 6.5, but has been deprecated.

vCLI version 6.5 is supported by the following OS:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.6, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 (Server) 64-bit
• Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, 15.10, and 16.04 (LTS) 64-bit
• SLES 11 SP3 and 12 64-bit
• Windows 8 and 10 64-bit
• Windows 2008 and 2012 R2 64-bit

Version 6.5 is also compatible with ESXi 6.0 Update 3 and vCenter Server 6.0 Update 3.