I deploy vmware-server with puppet and wanted to automate the installation of a serial number. I thought I was going to use ‘vmware-cmd’ for this, but I got the truth out of vmware-cmd.pl, that you use ‘vmware-vmx’. I really need to stop using vmware, most of it’s features seem to be that it was windows admin friendly gui interfaces all over the place, and while it has API’s, they’re poorly documented because they just aren’t that widely used. I story the key manually in iclassify for now, producing the vmwarekey variable because it’s an attribute.

if $vmwarekey {

  exec { "vmware-server-license":

    command => "/usr/lib/vmware-server/bin/vmware-vmx --new-sn ${vmwarekey}",

    onlyif => "/usr/bin/test ! -f /etc/vmware/license.vs.1.0-00",

    require => Package["vmware-server"],

  }

}