I received this question from one of our TAMs (Technical Account Managers) last week asking what is the difference between the vSphere CLI and the vSphere SDK for Perl and whether you need to install both of them. The simple answer is there is no difference, but why do we have two packages then? Well, this was probably due to how the vSphere SDK for Perl and the vCLI was initially introduced and was distributed in two separate packages.

Starting with the vSphere SDK for Perl 4.0, both the SDK packages and the vCLI commands have been combined together. However, it looks like both packages are still being produced as part of the automated build process and this will be consolidated in a single distribution in a future release. Going forward, you can just download the vSphere CLI which is always tied to a vSphere release and you will be ensured that is fully compatible with the latest release.

For more details behind each of the packages, you can take a look at the quick summary below:

vSphere SDK for Perl

The vSphere SDK for Perl is just a client-side Perl framework that provides administrators with a scripting interface to the vSphere API. As part of the SDK (Software Development Kit) it also provides a variety of sample scripts.

vSphere CLI

The vSphere CLI or the vCLI for short is just a set of command-line scripts that implements a sub-set of the functionality from the vSphere API. These scripts include the vicfg-* commands which are remote version of the legacy esxcfg-* commands, as well as ESXCLI, vmkfstools and resxtop commands that can also be run remotely. Most importantly, the vicfg-* commands are built on top of the vSphere SDK for Perl and this is one of the reasons you need to have the vSphere SDK for Perl installed if you wish to use the vCLI commands.