VMware continues to roll the Update 3 for its flagship product: VI 3.5.
At the beginning of October the patch was made available for vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 2.5.
One month later the Update 3 hit ESX 3.5. And now it finally reaches the free version of ESX: ESXi 3.5
But unlikely the other products this fix doesn’t just fix the bugs and extends the hardware support.
The ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (build 123629) introduces a full set of APIs.
The VMware documentation doesn’t mention this aspect but Rich Brambley reported the major improvement: so far the only way to automate the management (for example through PowerShell) of this free hypervisor was to pass through vCenter and use the VI SDK.
Now vCenter can be skipped and ESXi directly managed in a programmatic way (or through free/low-cost vCenter alternatives that may bring in some sort of innovative features).
As consequence of this, the Update 3 brings in a read/write Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI), meaning that finally the customers will be able to change the hypervisor settings without using the vCenter Client.