I haven’t been working with ESX for a bit, but while I was I was mostly interacting with it via the command line.  Here is a list I had compiled while I was going through that exercise, and since I while be starting a job next week where I will no longer be interacting with much ESX I will just publish this one as-is.  It is by no means complete and frankly it is not even that helpful.  Notice that the commands which reference a specific virtual machine have a number, this is the VM ID for the VM you’d like to interact with.

This is specifically to interact with VMs on ESX 5.  There is also esxcli which will allow you to make hypervisor level changes such as configuring a vSwitch, the esxcli is similar to a switch in how it behaves but it is beyond the scope of this article.

List All VMs on the Host

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

Get Information for a Specific VM

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/get.guest 30

Get Configuration for a Specific VM

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/get.config 30

Get Summary for a Specific VM

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/get.summary 30

Get Current Power State of a Specific VM

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.getstate 30

Power On a Specific VM

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on 30

Power Off a Specific VM (Hard)

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.off 30

Shutdown a Specific VM

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.shutdown 30

Reboot a Specific VM

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.reset 30

List a Specific VM’s Snapshots

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/get.snapshot 30

Unregister a VM from a ESX Host

bash 
vim-cmd vmsvc/unregister 30

Register a VM on a ESX Host

bash 
vim-cmd solo/registervm path/to/.vmx